Cyber Espionage

Cyber espionage is the offense of using unauthorized access to a computer system or network to covertly gather confidential government, military, corporate or personal information for intelligence, military or competitive advantage, distinguished from ordinary computer hacking chiefly by this underlying espionage purpose, gathering and exfiltrating sensitive information over time, rather than the disruption, theft of funds or public disclosure that motivates many other cyber offenses. State-sponsored cyber espionage, in which the offense is carried out by or on behalf of a government intelligence or military service against a foreign state or its institutions, occupies a distinctive and often contested legal position, since much of the same underlying conduct, unauthorized computer access, closely resembles conduct that traditional espionage law has long treated as a matter for diplomatic and intelligence responses rather than ordinary criminal prosecution, and attribution to a specific state actor is frequently difficult to establish with the certainty a criminal proceeding requires. Industrial or corporate cyber espionage, the unauthorized access of a competitor's or business partner's systems to obtain trade secrets, product designs or strategic business information, is prosecuted under ordinary domestic computer-crime and trade-secret law and does not raise the same state-actor complications, though it frequently involves techniques, such as a prolonged, deliberately covert intrusion designed to avoid detection, similar to those used in state-sponsored operations. Because cyber espionage is designed specifically to remain undetected for as long as possible, it is frequently discovered only well after the fact, if at all, making it one of the more difficult cyber offenses to measure and prosecute compared with more immediately disruptive offenses such as a denial-of-service attack or ransomware extortion.