Cyberspace
is the battlefield of the future, with attackers already going after banks and
other financial institutions and developing the ability to strike US power
grids and government systems, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said yesterday.
“We confront a whole
new threat of warfare in (cyberspace). ... This is an area we’ve got to pay
close attention to. This is the battlefront of the future,” he told a business
group in Norfolk, Virginia, a city at the center of one of the largest
concentrations of military power in the United States.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon
Panetta
Panetta’s remarks
came a week after he delivered a major policy speech on cyber security to a New
York business group, saying the US military could act pre-emptively if it
detects an imminent threat of cyber attack.
US banks and
financial institutions have been under sustained attack in recent weeks by
suspected Iranian hackers thought to be responding to economic sanctions aimed
at forcing Tehran to negotiate over its nuclear program.
A group calling
itself the Cyber Fighters of Izz ad-din Al Qassam has claimed credit for the
disruptions, calling them a protest against an anti-Islam video posted on
YouTube that has provoked violent protests across the Muslim world.
“As I speak, there
are attacks going on in this country, cyber attacks, on financial institutions,
on banks,” Panetta told the business group yesterday, adding that Washington
faces hundreds of thousands of attacks per day. He did not specify the country
from which the attacks were originating.
“Now they are
developing the capability to be able to go after our grid, our power grid, our
financial systems, our government systems, and virtually paralyze this
country,” he said.
William Robertson, an
assistant professor at Northeastern University in Boston who testified on cyber
security legislation in Congress earlier this year, said in an interview the
government is “quite understandably worried” about the threat.
“I don’t think it’s
hyperbole,” he added. “These kinds of attacks that he’s talking about have
actually been going on for quite some time. And they’ve been increasing in
intensity lately.”
Panetta said last
week the United States has made significant investments in cyber forensics to
deal with the problem of identifying the source of a cyber attack. He warned
potential attackers that the United States has “the capacity to locate them and
hold them accountable.”
Robertson said identifying
the source of a cyber attack remains difficult.
“Identity and
attribution on the Internet are not very robust. If you look at kind of the
underlying protocols that kind of power the Internet ... there’s no real strong
mechanism for identifying where something is coming from,” he said.
Panetta also said
that more pressure on Congress is needed to push it to act to avoid a round of
automatic budget cuts due to go into effect in January.
The cuts would take
another US$500 billion (RM1.5 billion) from defence spending over the next
decade, following a US$487 billion cut in projected defence spending approved
last year.
Panetta called the
automatic cuts a “goofy mechanism” put into place by Congress to force
lawmakers “to do what they are supposed to do” and deal with the US budget
deficits.
“So they put a gun to
their heads and said if we don’t do what’s right we’ll blow our heads off,”
Panetta said. “And they didn’t do what is right and now the damn gun is cocked
to go off in January.” — Reuters
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