A new report released today claims that both China and Russia are leveraging what it calls "cyber espionage" to enhance their respective countries' economic development.

The new "Foreign Spies Stealing US Economic Secrets in Cyberspace" report sent to Congress reveals that there's a lot of sensitive information and research on various computer networks that foreign hackers can quickly collect without being detected.

Among the many ways that spies are collecting information include getting the information remotely via an Internet connection and then downloading it to a storage device like a memory stick and sending it to others via email.

What's making spies more elusive these days is that while in the past "spies were taking out information by file folders, today they're taken out in thumb drives," a senior U.S. intelligence official said.