New generation cellular telephones -- which offer wider channel width and much faster data rates that allow video and the internet to be shown on a handheld telephone screen -- are being driven by the large commercial market for games, pornography and gambling, say top electronic warfare researchers.

That popularity is reducing prices so that these same capabilities are being adopted and reshaped to fill the arsenals of the worlds' military cyber warriors. Military organizations around the globe, including the U.S., are using commercially developed attack and network exploitation technologies to build an arsenal of rapidly upgradable, flexible and hard to avoid cyber weapons.

In fact, the ability to move lots of data quickly and securely is expected to eliminate many of the aircrew from the U.S. Air Force's premier Rivet Joint signals intelligence aircraft and the Army and Navy's next attempts at the Aerial Common Sensor, a next-generation intelligence gathering aircraft.

As network technology improvements accelerate, however, the typical hacker has changed from the precocious teenager to members of organized crime groups, says Rance Walleston, BAE Systems' director of information warfare and information operations initiative tells Aviation Week & Space Technology.

"Anybody who has gone after illegal money in the past is just finding a new way to do it," he says. "It's becoming global. We can identify from their methods of attacking networks whether it's Russian or Brazilian crime gangs."

"In China, it's like the Wild West of networks," says a military cyber warrior. "They really beat each other up. Cyber warfare is a way of doing business. If you are a voice over IP provider, it's considered fair game for your opponent to take down your network. From a customer's perspective, they just see that their service isn't working. They don't realize that other companies are taking them down so the effect can be used for industrial extortion."

It used to be that hackers wanted their name associated with the great vulnerabilities they found. But now that big money is involved, they don't publish what they're doing say cyber specialists.