It's like something out of James Bond - a single "state actor" hacking into computer systems all over the world; government agencies, defense contractors, political organizations, even the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency were compromised.  McAfee's Operation Shady Rat could be the basis for an intriguing spy novel, with China at the center.

In mid-2006 McAfee Labs began collecting and analyzing logs from a single server in an attempt to trace the hacking of 72 corporations, government organizations, and non-profits in 14 countries; their conclusions were recently made public - that the intrusions have escalated dramatically and they point to a single "state actor."  McAfee won't come out and say it, but experts say that state actor is China; the company does say that hundreds more servers were used.

According to McAfee, "The interest in the information held at the Asian and Western national Olympic Committees, as well as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the World Anti-Doping Agency in the lead-up and immediate follow-up to the 2008 Olympics was particularly intriguing and potentially pointed a finger at a state actor behind the intrusions, because there is likely no commercial benefit to be earned from such hacks. The presence of political non-profits, such as the a private western organization focused on promotion of democracy around the globe or U.S. national security think tank is also quite illuminating. Hacking the United Nations or the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Secretariat is also not likely a motivation of a group interested only in economic gains."

It's not only political and Olympical rivals they're targeting, though.  "What we have witnessed over the past five to six years has been nothing short of a historically unprecedented transfer of wealth — closely guarded national secrets (including from classified government networks), source code, bug databases, email archives, negotiation plans and exploration details for new oil and gas field auctions, document stores, legal contracts, SCADA configurations, design schematics and much more has 'fallen off the truck' of numerous, mostly Western companies and disappeared in the ever-growing electronic archives of dogged adversaries," writes Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee’s VP of Threat Research, in the company blog.  Read his entire blog post for all the details and a breakdown of who was hacked.