China’s aggressive campaign of cyber-espionage began about a decade ago, with attacks on U.S. government agencies. (The details have still not been divulged.) Then China broadened the scope of its efforts, infiltrating the civilian sector in order to steal intellectual property and gain competitive advantage over Western companies. Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research at McAfee, who gave Aurora and Night Dragon their names and has written definitive studies of A.P.T. attacks, says that “today we see pretty much any company that has valuable intellectual property or trade secrets of any kind being pilfered continually, all day long, every day, relentlessly.”

Alexey Navalny’s latest project is the Web site RosPil. The site would not be possible without Medvedev’s initiative, two years ago, to post online all government requests for tender—the documents whereby government entities announce their need for goods or services to potential bidders. Almost immediately, reports of strange deals started surfacing in the press. One regional governor arranged to buy thirty gold-and-diamond wristwatches; a spokesman explained that they were gifts to honor local teachers, but the deal was abruptly cancelled when the press got wind of it. The Interior Ministry ordered a hand-carved bed made of rare wood, gilded. St. Petersburg authorities ordered two million rubles’ worth of mink for seven hundred patients in a psychiatric institution.

Last summer, the world’s top software-security experts were panicked by the discovery of a drone-like computer virus, radically different from and far more sophisticated than any they’d seen. The race was on to figure out its payload, its purpose, and who was behind it. As the world now knows, the Stuxnet worm appears to have attacked Iran’s nuclear program. And while its source remains something of a mystery, Stuxnet is the new face of 21st-century warfare: invisible, anonymous, and devastating.

Over the course of several years, during much of which he worked for the government, Albert Gonzalez and his crew of hackers and other affiliates gained access to roughly 180 million payment-card accounts from the customer databases of some of the most well known corporations in America: OfficeMax, BJ’s Wholesale Club, Dave & Buster’s restaurants, the T. J. Maxx and Marshalls clothing chains. They hacked into Target, Barnes & Noble, JCPenney, Sports Authority, Boston Market and 7-Eleven’s bank-machine network. In the words of the chief prosecutor in Gonzalez’s case, “The sheer extent of the human victimization caused by Gonzalez and his organization is unparalleled.”

When will China emerge as a military threat to the U.S.? In most respects the answer is: not anytime soon—China doesn’t even contemplate a time it might challenge America directly. But one significant threat already exists: cyberwar.