There have been rumors of a high-level government laptop breach floating around in last couple of days. The rumor looks confirmed by an AP report this morning that says the US government is investigating whether Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez's laptop contents were copied during a recent trip to China and the information captured used to hack into the Department of Commerce's computers.

According to the story, "Surreptitious copying is believed to have occurred when a laptop was left unattended during Gutierrez's trip to Beijing for trade talks in December..."

The story adds that, "In the period after Gutierrez returned from China in December, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team - known as US-CERT, some of the government's leading computer forensic experts - rushed to the Commerce Department on at least three occasions to respond to serious attempts at data break-ins ..."

The AP story also says, "The Commerce Department break-ins have been so serious that its Bureau of Industry and Security, which regulates exports of sensitive technology that might be used in weapons, effectively unplugged itself from the Internet."

In another, very long story that appeared in Government Executive, Chinese hackers are suspected as causing recent power blackouts in New York and Florida.

As reported in the story, "Tim Bennett, the former president of the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, a leading trade group, said that U.S. intelligence officials have told him that the PLA in 2003 gained access to a network that controlled electric power systems serving the northeastern United States. ...These officials believe that the intrusion may have precipitated the largest blackout in North American history, which occurred in August of that year. A 9,300-square-mile area, touching Michigan, Ohio, New York, and parts of Canada, lost power; an estimated 50 million people were affected."

{Update: A blog over at Wired throws some cold water on this idea.}

The story goes on to describe the potential threat of a cyber attack, especially on the US banking system.

As an example, "Lawrence Wright of The New Yorker reported earlier this year that [Director of National Intelligence Mike] McConnell told Bush during the 2006 Oval Office meeting, 'If the 9/11 perpetrators had focused on a single U.S. bank through cyberattack and it had been successful, it would have had an order-of-magnitude greater impact on the U.S. economy.' According to Wright, the president was disturbed, and then asked Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr., who was at the meeting, if McConnell was correct; Paulson assured the president that he was."

The story has a nice quote from Gen. William Lord, the provisional commander of the new US Air Force Cyberspace Command, that I think nicely sums up the problem of cyber warfare: "The problem with this kind of warfare is determining who is the enemy, what is their intent, and where are they, and then what can you do about it?"