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 anonymity issue is a big question. As long as people can disguise cyber attacks and as long as there is a sort of question mark over who is responsible, then the problem will continue to exist. And of course what happens in response to that is that there is a move to try and refashion the Internet so that anonymity is impossible, which of course leads to fears among all sorts of groups - civil rights groups, NGOs, and political parties - that the Internet is going to be used simply as a method of control. So these are very sensitive issues.

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.

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.

What has happened is that we have seen a shift in the past twenty years in the very concept of hacking. So hacking twenty years ago was a neutral, positive concept. Somebody who was a hacker was someone with advanced computer skills, which could expose vulnerabilities and could explain why systems worked well or worked badly and they were generally regarded as an asset. Over the past twenty years, a combination of media and law enforcement has changed the perception of the concept so that it has almost always, if not invariably, a pejorative sense attached.

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.