Google in China: A geopolitical thriller

The saga of Google in China this year shows what can happen when the irresistible force of the Internet meets the immovable object of a paranoid state bureaucracy. Google in January declared that a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack" on its infrastructure, coming from China and possibly involving employees, had resulted in some of its intellectual property being stolen. Google, which decided to stop censoring search results in China, said the December attack on its servers had targeted the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. In March, Google began automatically redirecting Internet traffic from its Chinese site to its site in Hong Kong, which provides uncensored search results. The move angered Chinese officials and threatened to derail the renewal of the company's operating license. To win over Chinese officials, rather than redirecting traffic automatically, Google decided to send visitors to a "landing page" with limited services, from where they can choose to click on a link leading to the Hong Kong site. The compromise resulted in the renewal of Google's license. Intellectual property rights and the battle over access to data, however, are issues that will no doubt continue to shade relations between Western companies and the Chinese government.

Stuxnet: Industrial systems under attack

Security experts have been warning for years that industrial systems could be hit hard by a cyberattack. This year it finally happened, with the discovery of the first worm written specifically to disrupt large-scale industrial systems. Stuxnet first looked like it was created to steal industrial secrets. But in September researchers said the worm was probably built to sabotage Iran's nuclear program. One expert, noting that Stuxnet looks for specific Siemens settings on Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) devices, said it was probably targeting the Bushehr nuclear reactor. At the end of November, Iranian President  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad acknowledged that Stuxnet had created problems for some of the country's nuclear centrifuges. The success of Stuxnet  helps insure that the first worm that targeted industrial systems is not the last.

International teamwork breaks up Zeus botnet crime ring