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

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 attack on the law firms and attacks like that are industrial espionage, searching for copyrighted materials to lift and so on; it's not quite the same as cyber-warfare. They are regarded as related. The Chinese are trying to steal an economic march on the West, which is a consequence of the fact that we outsourced all of our manufacturing to China in the 1990s.

The internet is fracturing into a series of huge country-based intranets, in which governments define, in the name of security, what is legitimate personal and intellectual communication, and what is not.

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.

What we're going to get as this next generation grows up is more hacking skills and this is spreading geographically also - Africa is about to come on the scene, South and Central America are going to be major sources of hackers. These people have got to be engaged with.

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.