"It is evident that, whether government influenced or not, that the dual path of aggression is a new way of facing the world, at least from North Korea."

Further reading

The Internet has increasingly become the medium for deniable nation-state activity. From China's cyber-espionage to the United States' and Israel's alleged attack on Iran's nuclear program using the Stuxnet worm, cyber conflict has become a staple of nations' covert military intelligence and reconnaissance operations.

In February, for example, incident-response firm Mandiant released a report detailing the connections between an intelligence unit of China's People's Liberation Army and widespread attacks on U.S. companies and interests. In a blog posted on April 24, security firm Cyber Squared said that analysts using the firm's Threat Connect forum had found that those attacks had continuedunabated and defied prediction, by hardly changing their tactics.

"Many within the global security industry, both public and private sectors, speculated that the group’s tactics, tools and procedures (TTPs) would change drastically in response to the disclosure," the firm stated in the post. "As of late April 2013, Chinese cyber-espionage threat groups have clearly continued their activity ... (and) in fact, there has been little change."

The United States is currently considering a variety of options in response to Chinese unabashed hacking, including trade sanctions and other diplomatic pressure, the prosecution of Chinese nationals in U.S. courts and striking back at the Chinese through cyber-space, according to officials cited in an Apr. 22 article in the Wall Street Journal.

The U.S. government has also signaled that cyber-operations have become a priority