Both Russia and China nurture hackers who can wage cyberwar on other companies and organisations, according to security analyst Rick Howard, who was in London today to promote his company iDefense.

He said Russia has the most skilled cybercriminals in the world, and its government regards hackers as an asset though it does not necessarily control what they do.

Hackers launched Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) in Estonia and Georgia when those countries were confronting Russia. But this sort of attack was often the case of pro-Russian hackers getting together on the web and decided on some form of action, Howard said.

The Chinese government denies hacking activities but otherwise does not seem to care whether anyone knows that it is involved.

"The government sort of officially sanctions [hacking]. They run competitions to find out who the amateurs are who are pretty good. And then they train them on the latest information warfare tactics.

"We tracked one group in 2006 - which is still active, by the way - the NCPH... Network Crack Program Hacker group. They were students when they started and the hacker name of the leader is Wicked Rose.

"He was a pretty good hacker. On his own he was hacking into Taiwanese government places and doing some mischief. He got noticed by the government and got invited to enter one of these local competitions. He got put into a four-man team and won. He then got put in a four-man team in a national competition and won that. And because of that he got put on the 30-day information warfare training programme that the Chinese put together.

"Six months later his group was hacking  into all the US government institutions. They were siphoning off thousands, if not millions, of documents from unclassified systems."

The information may not have been top-secret but cumulatively it could have provided a lot of valuable intelligence, Howard said.
Howard said the information warfare programme in China dates back to 1998 when "a couple of colonels" thought that they would have to go up against the US at some point.

"In their early documents they said that by 2025 they would be ready to take the US on, not with tanks but with asymmetric warfare...the information war. They have been practicing that philosophy since then."

The US government gave the code name Titan Rain to a wave of co-ordinated hacking attacks on its institutions. UK government departments have also been targeted, according to a Guardian report.