January 8, 2008: Military intelligence experts are pondering just what Chinese hackers want with the Pennsylvania State government. On January 4th, a hacker was discovered to have gotten onto the state government web site system. All state sites were shut down until the damage could be assessed and taken care of. Turned out the hacker, who was traced back to China, was trying to plant a virus. This was believed to be just another attempt to plant a hidden program that wound infect people using state government web sites. But four different state department sites were attacked. So it was either a massive attack, a coincidence, or something else.

Attacks on federal networks, traced back to China, and definitely out to steal data, have been suffered with increasing frequency over the last two years. For a major Cyber War attack on the United States, state government would have to be hit, along with federal networks. But this would be the first case of state sites being hacked for this, if it was part of a Chinese Cyber War effort.