Thank you.
Thank you, Minister, and your officials for coming this morning. I'd like to touch on something that concerns me. It was the Munk Centre report on cyber espionage, which, as they stated, is an issue whose time has come. I'll just read you a few excerpts from their second report in the Information Warfare Monitor, and then I'm wondering if you and/or your officials can comment on the issue and how we're preparing to deal with it.
The investigation ultimately uncovered a network of 1,300 infected hosts in 103 countries. Up to 30% of the infected hosts are considered high-value targets and include computers located in the ministries of foreign affairs, embassies, international organizations, news media, and NGOs.
They say--and I think they're correct--that this raises more questions than it answers. It does point to a particular area of concern to many in the world and to me. We must be careful to say that they're all allegations, but there is some weight to them. It says that some may conclude that what we lay out here points definitively to China as the culprit, and of course they talk about strategic domains in cyberspace that redress the military imbalance between China and the rest of the world, particularly the United States. Then they quantify it by saying that China has, of course, the world's largest Internet population, and then they say something that I think we all need to know, which is that the Internet was never built with security in mind.
I'm just going through some of the issues. They say:
This report serves as a wake-up call. At the very least, a large percentage of high-value targets compromised by this network demonstrate the relative ease with which a technically unsophisticated approach can quickly be harnessed to create a very effective spynet.
I wonder if you and/or your officials can comment on that.