World...Meet Your New Superpower

File this one in the "careful what you wish for" category. Over the past 8 years, we have watched so many nations adopt as their hobby the bashing of America and all things American. As if a world without America would somehow be some sort of magical place. Well...world...You will own your ignorance. And you will own it hard. From the Guardian:

An enormous electronic espionage programme run from servers in China has been used to spy on computers in more than 100 countries, according to two reports published at the weekend.

The reports, published by the universities of Cambridge and Toronto, detail a "murky realm" where cyber spooks infiltrate email, take over humble desktop computers and use them to spy on organisations, individuals and governments.

The reports name the system GhostNet, and claim that it has been used to attack governments in south and south-east Asia as well as the offices of the Dalai Lama. In two years, the reports suggest, the operation infiltrated 1,295 computers in 103 countries.

While one of the reports remains mute on the identity of the perpetrators, the other has no such qualms, warning that the Chinese government ran a series of cyber attacks on Tibetan exile groups. The Chinese foreign ministry could not be reached for comment.

"What Chinese spooks did in 2008, Russian crooks will do in 2010 and even low-budget criminals from less developed countries will follow in due course," conclude the Cambridge authors of The Snooping Dragon: Social Malware Surveillance of the Tibetan Movement.

The attacks were simple and direct. Infected emails bearing attachments or links to websites were sent to organisations including the private office of the Dalai Lama. Once opened, the virus allowed hackers to operate the host computer, including moving files and sending and receiving data. Their potential control was such that they could turn on an infected computer's camera and microphone, creating a surveillance bug.

Damn Chinese!