Countries are equipped with "ciberarmas" for virtual conflict

U.S., Russia, France, Israel and China are equipped with "ciberarmas" according to a report released Tuesday by the Internet security firm McAfee, who also said that the politically motivated cyber attacks have increased in recent months .

Virtual Criminology Report each year McAfee has said that U.S. White House, the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service and the Defense Department have been victims of politically motivated cyberattacks.

The attacks, in the form of "denial of service" in coordination occurred on July 4, the date that the United States celebrates its independence, and also affected the Treasury Department, the New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq, Amazon and Yahoo .

A few days later on 11 Internet sites of the South Korean government were "turned off" by the same network of 50,000 computers used to attack the U.S..

The secret services of Seoul to North Korea accused of orchestrating the attack, the report said.

Dmitri Alperovitch, research vice president of McAfee's Virus, the report speculates that if the U.S. attacks and South Korea originated in North Korea, the motivation could have been testing the impact of the attacks on the communications between the two countries and their effect on military communications.

Another case cited by the signature is the information avalanche Georgia suffered in parallel to the armed conflict with Russia remained the region of South Ossetia in the summer of 2008.

In 2007, another former Soviet republic, Estonia, saw a flood caused by denial of service attack the websites of their government. The attacks lasted for weeks and affected everyone in the country, often preventing their access to bank accounts via the Internet.

In this environment, McAffe said countries are developing their military capabilities in cyberspace, what he called a "race ciberarmas" which is in the crosshairs government computer networks and other infrastructure critical to the functioning of nations.

The report notes that the theoretical and actual targets of these attacks are power grids, transportation systems, telecommunications, finance and water supply "because the damage can be done quickly and with little effort."

But the report also warned that the private sector that is at greatest risk of attack, partly because the critical infrastructure of a country is usually in the hands of private companies and partly because the industry depends on governments to prevent attacks