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The U.S. and China have reached their first ever cybercrime and cyberespionage agreement, but the deal is quite general and how it will translate into actions is still unclear.Leaders of both countries announced the deal in Washington on Friday after two days of top-level talks, but both dodged questions on specific hacking incidents or the indictment last year by the U.S. of five Chinese military hackers for cybercrimes."We have agreed that neither the U.S. or the Chinese government will conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information for commercial advantage," President Obama said at a White House news conference.And that appears to be the main thrust of the agreement -- government-sponsored cyberespionage for the economic gain of companies. It doesn't cover government espionage and is pretty specific in its definition but, as President Obama indicated: It's a start.

To the young Syrian rebel fighter, the Skype message in early December 2013 appeared to come from a woman in Lebanon, named Iman Almasri, interested in his cause. Her picture, in a small icon alongside her name, showed a fair-skinned 20-something in a black head covering, wearing sunglasses.They chatted online for nearly two hours, seemingly united in their opposition to the rule of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian leader still in power after a civil war that has taken more than 200,000 lives. Eventually saying she worked “in a programing company in Beirut,” the woman asked the fighter whether he was talking from his computer or his smartphone. He sent her a photo of himself and asked for another of her in return. She sent one immediately, apologizing that it was a few years old.“Angel like,” he responded. “You drive me crazy.”

What the fighter did not know was that buried in the code of the second photo was a particularly potent piece of malware that copied files from his computer, including tactical battle plans and troves of information about him, his friends and fellow fighters. The woman was not a friendly chat partner, but a pro-Assad hacker — the photos all appear to have been plucked from the web.

The Syrian conflict has been marked by a very active, if only sporadically visible, cyberbattle that has engulfed all sides, one that is less dramatic than the barrel bombs, snipers and chemical weapons — but perhaps just as effective. The United States had deeply penetrated the web and phone systems in Syria a year before the Arab Spring uprisings spread throughout the country. And once it began, Mr. Assad’s digital warriors have been out in force, looking for any advantage that could keep him in power.In this case, the fighter had fallen for the oldest scam on the Internet, one that helped Mr. Assad’s allies. The chat is drawn from a new study by the intelligence-gathering division of FireEye, a computer security firm, which has delved into the hidden corners of the Syrian conflict — one in which even a low-tech fighting force has figured out a way to use cyberespionage to its advantage. FireEye researchers found a collection of chats and documents while researching malware hidden in PDF documents, which are commonly used to share letters, books or other images. That quickly took them to the servers where the stolen data was stored.

here’s yet another tantalizing clue that the National Security Agency and its “Five Eyes” allies are behind a poweful cyber-espionage tool called Regin, used to spy on friend and enemy alike. That’s the conclusion Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky drew after examining the source code of Regin and an innocuously-named spying tool called QWERTY. It’s an appropriate monicker. The malware, known as a keylogger,  vacuums up anything typed on a computer keyboard and sends it back to the programmer controlling it. The crucial clue Kaspersky found is that QWERTY “can only operate as part of the Regin platform.” After tracking Regin across 14 countries for years, Kaspersky and technology firm Symantec identified it in November 2014.  At the time, Symantec said Regin’s “capabilities and the level of resources behind [it] indicate that it is one of the main cyberespionage tools used by a nation state.” 

Though neither company said it, suspicion immediately arose that the NSA and its allies had created Regin. It immediately drew comparisons with Stuxnet, the joint U.S.-Israeli computer worm used to damage Iranian nuclear centrifuges in Natanz in 2009. Unlike Stuxnet’s narrow mission of sabotage, Regin is designed for spying in a wide set of environments. It hides in plain sight, disguised as ordinary Microsoft software.

The new evidence further points to the Five Eyes. The German news magazine Der Spiegel has a trove of documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, which included the source code. Der Spiegel gave Kaspersky the code to examine: The new analysis provides clear proof that Regin is in fact the cyber-attack platform belonging to the Five Eyes alliance, which includes the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Neither Kaspersky nor Symantec commented directly on the likely creator of Regin. But there can be little room left for doubt regarding the malware’s origin. Der Spiegel pointed to five elements they believe suggest Five Eyes authorship: the presence of QWERTY in Snowden’s files, its use in the Belgacom hack by Britain’s GCHQ, references to the sport of cricket in the code, structural similarities to tools outlined in other Snowden documents, and targets consistent with other Five Eyes tools and campaigns.