Cyber War: The new challenge of US's foreign relations

FireEye, a cyber security company in United States, released an analysis and it shows that a hacker group, dubbed APT28 has a lot of attacks in the past two years against Nato, the EU and some government ministries.
The report said:“APT28’s characteristics----their targeting, malware, language and working hours----have led us to conclude that we are tracking a focused, longstanding espionage effort. Given the available data, we assess that APT28’s work is sponsored by the Russian government.”
For Russia, besides the reports from companies in United States, there is no unambiguous evidence showed Russia is an attacker in cyberwarfare. In 2008, a report from US Cyber Consequences Unit showed that Georgia was the victim of a cyber attack by Russia because of the diplomatic dispute caused by the accident of a Georgian surveillance drone was shot down by suspected Russian fighter. For United States, the threat of a cyber war is not an empty one. It is only a question of who and when.
It happens that there is a similar case. This is not the first time FireEye released the reports shows that the hacker groups activities. Last year, one of their reports shows that a Chinese hacker group called APT1. Then, the US government announced that some Chinese military officers are the members of APT1.
APTs are as known as Advanced Persistent Threats, this sort of attacks are more important than before. For the governments of countries, Internet is not only used in attacking the other countries but also making their countries being monitored.
According to the guardian, some hackers has attacked the iCloud storage service to steal the information such as photos, imessages, contacts of users, iCloud users in China are the target. The hackers are using “man in the middle”attack which means they broke the secure of the connection between the users and the servers. A surveillance experts said: Chinese government is behind it.
The Chinese foreign ministry did not comment on the report but the Chief Executive Tim Cook of Apple and Vice Premier Ma Kai has discussed user data security on Wednesday in Beijing. China believe there will be more talks about the Internet security between the US and China in the future. "I believe that we can forge more agreements and maintain Sino-US relations at the forthcoming World Internet Conference," Lu Wei, director of the Cyberspace Administration of China, said in a news conference.

The interesting thing is that China has been accused of cyberespionage by the United States for many times.President Obama told ABC News, US is going to have a “tough talk” with China about the cyber war. Du Yuejing, a expert of China Network Security Space Association, said that in the recent years, before the Sino US Summit, the American media always started to have the news reports about the Chinese hackers. Although the motivations of these behaviors are not clear, some network security companies of the United States obviously had some business opportunities from this kind of news reports. He Maochun, a professor in Tsinghua University, said that these kind of methods are always used by the United States. There will be the 22nd APEC economic leaders’ meeting in Beijing on November 10, Xi jinping, the president of China, won’t back down on a point of principle of China.

Cyber war, a new type of war which is more and more important in 21st century. The United States attached great importance to the cyber war.
In 2011, the "International Strategy for Cyberspace" was published by White House in order to reserve the right to use military force relating to the cyber warfare. In 2013, Edward Snowden claimed that the United States government attacked the system of the Chinese mobile phone companies to steal the information of the users. He said the spies from United States has used this way to monitor China for a long time.