There are two types of companies in the world: those that know they've been hacked, and those that don't.

The criminal justice system - although this applies less to the U.S., where rehabilitation is not seen as a valuable contribution to criminal justice - in Europe where rehab is supposed to be integral, we have no way of rehabilitating skilled hackers. On the contrary what we do is we demonize them and continue to do so after they come out of jail because we restrict their access to computers by law. Crazy world, crazy people.

The sort of sweeping parochial espionage and attempts to extract information from all sorts of institutions are well documented, but I think in this context there's a danger of oversimplifying and seeing that sector of cyber as a one-way street.

I think that we're now deep into a struggle for control over the Internet and there are various actors - state, corporate, civic, criminal and military. The great genius of the Internet is its interconnectedness, but this is also what makes it an incredibly difficult problem when things start to go wrong with it and when people exploit for their own purposes.

The Internet has fashioned a new and complicated environment for an age-old dilemma that pits the demands of security against the desire for freedom.

The issue of cyber-security, cyber-crime, and cyber-malfeasance has an impact on a whole range of issues, not the least of which is civil liberties, political activity, and so on and so forth.

One of the problem with cyber is that it lends itself to preemptive action. Your assets in cyber-warfare are your opponents' vulnerabilities, therefore in order to quantify your assets you have to be able to ascertain how vulnerable your opponents are and that involves pre-emptive exploration of your opponents' networks. So in that sense it lends itself to some pretty nasty stuff.