Posted on 02/23/2010 11:47:15 PM PST by ErnstStavroBlofeld
The United States would lose a cyberwar if it fought one today, a former US intelligence chief has warned.
Michael McConnell, a retired US Navy vice admiral who served as ex-president George W. Bush's director of national intelligence, also compared the danger of cyberwar to the nuclear threat posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
"If we went to war today in a cyberwar, we would lose," McConnell told a hearing Tuesday on cybersecurity held by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.
"We're the most vulnerable, we're the most connected, we have the most to lose.
"We will not mitigate this risk," added McConnell, now an executive vice president for consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton's national security business. "And as a consequence of not mitigating this risk, we are going to have a catastrophic event."
Tuesday's hearing came a little over a month after Internet giant Google revealed that it and other US companies had been the target of a series of sophisticated cyberattacks originating in China.
"National security and our economic security are at stake," said Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller, the panel's chairman and a co-sponsor of a bill seeking to bolster public and private sector cybersecurity cooperation.
"A major cyberattack could shut down our nation's most critical infrastructure -- our power grid, telecommunications, financial services."
James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that government intervention would probably be needed to crack down on the "Wild West" the Internet has become.
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
Gee, thanks for giving the enemy ideas...
I am pretty sure that its a well known problem.
I kind of doubt our “power grid” is on the Internet. Critical infrastructure is much more likely to be on private networks.
Geez, these guys are twice as incompetent as they appear; during any type of attack (counter measures not included) such as denial or swarming trap them in da DMZ or pull the cord on them letting them drop; I guess that one’s too easy. On the other hand this stuff does not come to light unless everyone wants it out there for political reasons…you cannot trust these political types…so as Reagan stated, “Trust but verify.”
The power grid is de-centralized and there is no and there’s no central control system.
Way too late to worry about that... We are NOT prepared for cyber warfare and won’t be anytime in the short term. Call it lack of education or just plain ignorance of the world...we are just NOT prepared. The only people who may be prepared to confront the issue are the youngsters - and they are continually being put down as radicals.
So the article is way over the top.
That’s a private network. It isn’t based on the Internet.
Wasn’t the electronic world was supposed to end on Y2K?
Fortune comes to the Prepared mind. We need to prepare for the day something like this might happen. If Chinese students can hack into Google, what is stopping them to hack in to the Defense Department or DOE computer system and steal secrets?
So China might win “EverQuest”(?) :O
Decades of H1B visas, a government that attacks the grey hat community, a government that crushes the legitimate American born IT community with imported labor and onerous IRS tax laws that lead men to fly planes into IRS buildings, isn’t the incubator for a patriotic cyber-militia?
Color me stunned.
I understand that, but it's a small network, plugged into a larger network, which can be hacked.
lol we couldn’t lose a cyber war.
We could just cut the lines where they leave the US if needed.
We should, anyway. Why do we need to accept packets from .ru and .cn, and similar places that are nothing but trouble? Yes, I have friends in some of these places, but the world would not end if the joke emails stopped. And it CERTAINLY would not end if Nigeria were unplugged, permanently.
Does anyone remember that wonderful week when a fiber in the Pacific went out? Wasn't it NICE to have all those Asian open relays disappear?
So. My business was listed on a Chamber of Commerce page. Within a week, the crap from Nigeria stated coming in. A plague on them. Why do we leave our doors unlocked for people who hate us and want us dead, or want to loot us. Are we STUPID??
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