“Cyber crime is becoming a severe threat to all nations,” said Mr Lennon Chang, a professor of criminology at City University of Hong Kong and author of the 2012 report, Cybercrime in Asia: Trends and Challenges. “Less developed nations like Myanmar might be more susceptible to these kinds of attacks [because] the whole cyber environment is more vulnerable to attacks as the government is less likely to be equipped to secure the cyber-world,” he said by email.
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Dr Chang agreed, saying: “Some attacks might look like they are state-sponsored as the attacks might target only certain types of information or certain people. Nonetheless, they might be conducted by patriots, not the government. Therefore, I think it might be dangerous to warn users about ‘state-sponsored’ attacks unless they have very strong evidence to prove it, or if they have a special reason to issue such a warning. These warnings might not help in future crime investigations, but might cause further harm.”
Both Dr Chang and Dr Broadhurst said that "political" cyber attacks are, from a technical standpoint, indistinguishable from "criminal" cyber attacks. Both rely on the same techniques to access and disrupt websites.
In recent years, Google has its own, very public struggles with security issues and cyberattacks. In addition to the aforementioned attacks believed to emanate from China, there are suspicions over the company's relationship with the National Security Agency, which handles both domestic and foreign surveillance and security gathering for the United States government.