Gloom and doom is the predicted forecast, but that is in regard to U.S. cybersecurity instead of the weather. Four top government cybersecurity officials have basically come out to say America is getting her hiney kicked in cyberattacks by nation state hackers.
"Your government failed you," testified Richard Clarke, a former cybersecurity and cyberterrorism advisor for the White House. He said that to Congress about 9/11, but now he's warning the people that we are defenseless when it comes to cybersecurity; our government has failed us again. Clarke stated, "Every major company in the United States has already been penetrated by China."
To begin with, the "United States government did the Stuxnet attack," Clarke claimed during an interview with Smithsonian. After dropping that bombshell, he then moved on to cyber espionage, stolen intellectual property and imported tech tainted with backdoor attack tools. He warned not to get him started on "our supply chain of chips, routers and hardware we import from Chinese and other foreign suppliers and what may be implanted in them -- 'logic bombs,' trapdoors and 'Trojan horses,' all ready to be activated on command so we won't know what hit us. Or what's already hitting us."
"My greatest fear," Clarke says, "is that, rather than having a cyber-Pearl Harbor event, we will instead have this death of a thousand cuts. Where we lose our competitiveness by having all of our research and development stolen by the Chinese. And we never really see the single event that makes us do something about it. That it's always just below our pain threshold. That company after company in the United States spends millions, hundreds of millions, in some cases billions of dollars on R&D and that information goes free to China....After a while you can't compete."
Then Shawn Henry, the FBI's 'top cyber cop,' told the Wall Street Journal the U.S. is "not winning" the war against computer criminals.
Uncle Sam needs hackers because we are, in fact, outgunned. After 24 years with the FBI, Henry is leaving the government to take a different cybersecurity job. But before the FBI's executive assistant director leaves, he admitted, "I don't see how we ever come out of this without changes in technology or changes in behavior, because with the status quo, it's an unsustainable model. Unsustainable in that you never get ahead, never become secure, never have a reasonable expectation of privacy or security.''
Henry's gloomy outlook seems to match up with Clarke's claim that China has hacked into every major U.S. company. Henry confirmed that while FBI agents were investigating other cases, they've found stolen data from companies that had no clue they were hacked. Company executives "are shocked and, in many cases, they've been breached for many months, in some cases years, which means that an adversary had full visibility into everything occurring on that network, potentially.''
In a speech last fall, Henry said a major cyberattack against the electric grid or water supply could "ultimately kill people." Such a disastrous and deadly scenario was precisely what senators witnessed in a secret demonstration earlier this month. The classified demo was of a mock cyberattack on New York City's power grid during a heat wave. Henry had previously suggested the U.S. needed to create an alternate closed internet for financial and critical infrastructure systems because "under the current Internet structure, we can't tech our way out of the cyber threat."
Now add in this tidbit from Bloomberg, the U.S. also needs to be concerned about North Korea launching anonymous cyberattacks against America. "North Korea employs sophisticated computer hackers trained to launch cyber infiltration and cyber attacks," Army General James Thurman, the commander of U.S. Forces Korea, will testify before Congress. Cyberattacks from North Korea's military "have been increasingly employed against a variety of targets including military, governmental, educational and commercial institutions."
Lastly, the NSA chief who denied the NSA has Total Information Awareness capabilities to mass spy on Americans, has now testified before Congress that China was indeed the nation state behind the RSA attacks. General Keith Alexander also admitted the government needs to do a better job against cyberattacks. "We need to make it more difficult for the Chinese to do what they're doing," Alexander said. "Intellectual property isn't well protected, and we can do a better job at protecting it."