Albert Einstein is famously quoted as saying that he didn't know what weapons World War III would be fought with but World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones. But looking through the prism of mutually assured destruction, perhaps the next great war will be fought in cyberspace. If that's the case, China has been accused of firing the first shot.

There have recently been a series of systematic attacks on high-profile US networks (dubbed "Titan Rain" last summer), including both government and defense contractor servers. These attacks have been traced to southern China (Guangdong, specifically) and are being characterized as intensely disciplined.

"These attacks come from someone with intense discipline. No other organization could do this if they were not a military organization," says Alan Paller, director of the SANS Institute. He further specified that the attackers made "no keystroke errors and left no fingerprints, and created a backdoor in less than 30 minutes."

According to Paller, the weak link in the chain seems to be the defense contractors. This is, he says, because "they are less willing to make it hard for mobile people to get their work done." Unfortunately, the result has been serious penetrations of government networks that Paller says the government has been less that forthright about. He laments this fact by saying, "the people who benefit from keeping it secret are the attackers."

And what is China's response been? So far, they are primarily pointing out that hacking is illegal in China.