Photo: csaveanu/flickr

Post your comments below

OK, the April Fool’s computer virus didn’t strike, didn’t rise up with its “botnet” and take over the world. But maybe it didn’t have to.

Just days before, a crack team of computer sleuths in Canada unveiled a global computer spying network, apparently run out of China, called “GhostNet.”

It’s a spying operation that has reached into more than a thousand key computers around the world, rifling through high-security files, even turning on computers’ cameras and microphones to watch and listen from halfway round the world.

This hour, On Point: The team who cracked the “GhostNet.”

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Toronto is Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, and the co-lead investigator on the team that exposed “GhostNet.” (Read their report here.) He also teaches political science and is co-founder and a principal investigator of the Information Warfare Monitor.

Joining us from Washington, D.C., is Rafal Rohozinski, co-lead investigator, with Ron Diebert, on the team that exposed “GhostNet,” and a founder and principal investigator of the Information Warfare Monitor. He is also a principal at The SecDev Group, a private think tank and consultancy with clients in “countries and regions at risk from violence and insecurity.” Its clients have included the U.S. Department of Defense.

Also from Washington, we’re joined by Siobhan Gorman, intelligence correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.