CIA Director Leon Panetta Warns of Possible Cyber-Pearl Harbor

ABC News ^ | Feb 11, 2011 | By JASON RYAN

[robowombat]

"The potential for the next Pearl Harbor could very well be a cyber-attack," he testified on Capitol Hill Thursday

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper also appeared, telling the committee, "This threat is increasing in scope and scale, and its impact is difficult to overstate."

........

Panetta told the committee, "This is a real national security threat that we have to pay attention to. I know there are a lot of aspects to it.

"The Internet, the cyber-arena ... is a vastly growing area of information that can be used and abused in a number of ways."

U.S. officials and computer security experts have faced a wide array of diverse and growing computer threats in the past several years, including attempted infiltrations of Defense Department computers, high- profile companies being hacked and the data breach and related cyber-attacks involving Wikileaks.

In particular:

The Pentagon disclosed last summer that in 2008 "malicious code" from a flash drive ended up on classified and unclassified systems of U.S. Central Command, which oversees the war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Entities in China were behind a highly sophisticated hacking of Google and more than 30 other companies in late 2009 that went undetected until January 2010. The hacking of Google's network was intended to gain access to the e-mail accounts of human rights activists in China.

Telecommunications companies in China displayed false computer data that rerouted about 15 percent of the world's online traffic last April through Chinese Internet servers for about 17 minutes, affecting NASA, the U.S. Senate, the four branches of the military, the office of the Secretary of Defense and a number of Fortune 500 companies.

Panetta's Stark Assessment

The FBI and private security experts tracked and traced large networks of "zombie-computers" dubbed

[broken_arrow1]

This coming from the profound head of intelligence who didn’t see Egyptian unrest coming, or Ft. Hood killer, or underpants bomber, or Time Square bomber? Panetta may be asleep at the wheel, or like the rest of the Obama administration and czars - under the influence of the dark side.

[tina07]

Zero met with the head honchos of MS, Apple and Facebook last week I believe it was, I don’t trust him. It’s more to take control away from we the people....

[WoofDog123]

pretty sure if china ever wants to, they will quite literally shut the lights off in the US, along with who knows what chaos in our financial, internet, and military traffic.