The ramp up and media blitz to justifying the Air Force Cyber command has began.

March 4, 2008 LINK TO STORY

(Media-Newswire.com) - 3/4/2008 - WASHINGTON ( AFPN ) -- Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England is the latest government official to express concern about the United States' cyberspace vulnerabilities.

"Cyber warfare is already here," said Mr. England. "It's one of our major challenges."

Describing the new battlefront, the deputy secretary said, "I think cyber attacks are probably analogous to the first time, way back when people had bows and arrows and spears, and somebody showed up with gunpowder and everybody said, 'Wow. What was that?'"

Mr. England, speaking to an audience Mar. 3 gathered here for a Veterans of Foreign Wars conference, noted that President Bush addressed the threat by establishing a task force to coordinate U.S. government efforts to safeguard computers against cyber attacks.

In addition, the United States and other NATO allies are expected to address the issue of cyber defense when the 20th NATO summit convenes in Bucharest, Romania, in early April.

Estonia, a NATO member, was victimized by a series of data-flooding attacks last year that brought down the Web sites of several daily newspapers and forced Estonia's largest bank to shut down its online banking network.

"Estonia happens to be very advanced, in terms of networks in their country," Mr. England said. "So a strength was turned into a vulnerability."

Last week, the Pentagon's top intelligence official today told a Senate committee that cyber threats are contributing to the "unusually complex" security environment the United States faces.

"A global military trend of concern is ... the sophisticated ability of select nations and non-state groups to exploit and perhaps target for attack our computer networks," Army Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Feb. 27.

Joining the Pentagon's top intelligence official at the hearing on current and future threats facing the United States was the director of national intelligence, retired Navy Vice Adm. John M. "Mike" McConnell. Asked by senators about cyber threats, Admiral McConnell said, "We're not prepared to deal with it."

"The United States information infrastructure, including telecommunications and computer networks and systems, and most importantly the data that reside on these systems is critical to virtually every aspect of our modern life," he continued. "Threats to our intelligence infrastructure are an important focus of this community."

Admiral McConnell said China, Russia and possibly other nation-states have been assessed as being capable of collecting or exploiting data held on U.S. information systems.


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