The International Monetary Fund disclosed this weekend that it recently was the victim of a cyberattack

The International Monetary Fund disclosed this weekend that it recently was the victim of a cyberattack. This comes hard on the heels of Google's revelation that a relatively sophisticated attack tried to compromise email accounts of high-profile American policy makers, and a security breach at RSA, a company that manufactures security devices used by hundreds of thousands of employees at thousands of companies to access sensitive information on corporate computer networks.

Such data breaches are becoming so commonplace they'll soon stop being news. The West, in short, is hemorrhaging data. But it increasingly looks like everyone is making matters worse by misidentifying the problem. Calling these episodes "cyberattacks" in a "cyberwar" is not helping. Such military terms are inapt for a situation where the means and purpose of the events are unclear, as are the antagonists. Careless use of these terms makes it harder to understand what's happening.

Blanket use of the word cyberattack conflates different kinds of crime with different means and motives. One is a denial-of-service incident, a genuine attack where gangs of computers are coordinated to descend on one website simultaneously, hobbling it. This happened to Georgia in 2008 around the time of an armed conflict with Russia. But there also are "advanced persistent threats," prolonged assaults on the defenses of a network that can go on for months or years. The first is a genuine attack. An advanced persistent threat is more akin to a thief checking every door and every window until he finds a way in to steal and leave undetected. This is what most cyberwar is, and probably will be in the future.

The IMF incident shows how confusion over the true nature of cyberwar makes it harder to address. Not a lot is known about the case. An IMF spokesman has merely issued a statement calling it a "cybersecurity incident." Given the propensity of organizations to drape a shroud of secrecy on such events, that may be all we'll ever know.