I think it's very likely that espionage -- industrial and otherwise -- will become a massive industry. Organized crime gangs will increasingly automate the harvesting of personal data, then figure out later where to sell it. This already happens, but I think we're facing a rapid increase in both scale and sophistication.

Hacking password-protected systems is already , and can be automated. But freelance industrial spies, following the suspected Chinese model, would launch multipronged, surgical attacks or simultaneous attacks on very large numbers of individual accounts. As in the Chinese hack, this harvesting can include the largest corporations as well as individual citizens. One of the targets in the Google China hack was a 20-year-old Stanford University sophomore named Tenzin Seldon , who is active in a student organization called Students for a Free Tibet. That's right. An American girl exercising her First Amendment right to free speech in the U.S. appears to have been targeted by the Chinese Communist Party as a threat, and as a subject for monitoring.

The state of the art (according to reports analyzing the Chinese attacks on Google) is to first target individuals within an organization who have access to sensitive and valuable secrets. That requires intelligence gathering before the actual hacking even begins. Then, send only the target people fake e-mails with PDF, Excel or other kinds of documents and make them appear to come legitimately from colleagues. Once opened, the documents install software that invisibly executes commands that open up access to the machine (and the user's network privileges) by the hacker. From there, the attackers could find and copy source code and other secrets. Much of the hacking was apparently designed to facilitate other hacks, of cyber-dissidents or of companies doing business in China.

Unlike conventional hack attacks, the Google-China hacks involved a lot of people, planning, research, intelligence gathering and sophisticated techniques by very motivated people who knew exactly what they were looking for.

Welcome to the new reality. It seems as if everyone is moving everything to the cloud. Meanwhile, sophisticated organizations out there are figuring out how to exploit cloud vulnerabilities to harvest valuable secrets. And if Google can't stop them, what chance do you and I have?