Only Google objects.  The ECONOMIST reports that China’s hackers may be the terror of the Earth, but in fact most of their attacks are rather workaday. America and Russia have hackers at least as good as China’s best, if not better. What distinguishes Chinese cyber-attacks, on anything from governments to Fortune 500 companies, defence contractors, newspapers, think-tanks, NGOs, Chinese human-rights groups and dissidents, is their frequency, ubiquity and sheer brazenness. This leads to an unnerving conclusion.

“They don’t care if they get caught,” says Dmitri Alperovitch, who used to work at McAfee, a computer-security firm, where he helped analyse several Chinese hacking operations in 2010 and 2011, and is a co-founder of CrowdStrike, another cyber-security firm. The indiscriminate tactics of China’s 2010-11 campaign made it relatively easy to track. His team identified more than 70 victims (among many more unidentified ones), dating back to 2006, and found that the average time the hackers stayed inside a computer network was almost a year. “They’ll go into an organisation and then stay there for five, six years, which of course increases the chances that they get caught.”

Mr Alperovitch offers two reasons for the careless abandon of China’s hackers. The first is that their attacks are on an industrial scale—“thousands of continuous operations”—so they could hardly be expected to go unnoticed. The second is that “they don’t see any downsides to being caught. They have so far not suffered economically or politically for being caught.”  Cyber Hacking