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DNI warns: U.S. financial data, transportation, power supply at risk to foreign cyber attacks

Saturday, March 7, 2008 Free Headline Alerts

Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell said last week that U.S. computer networks and information are vulnerable to foreign attack and U.S. defenses need to be improved.

McConnell said nations like Russia and China are trying to capture large amounts of data from U.S. systems. “One estimate I've seen is that volume was something in the 20 terabytes …the data that was taken out of the Department of Defense, the Department of State, universities, companies, the Congress and so on. So that's one level of threat,” he said.

The danger is that sophisticated hackers will gain entry to systems and can destroy data. “And the destroying data could be something like money supply, electric power distribution, transportation sequencing and that sort of thing,” he said.

“Our worry right now is the military's probably the best protected,” he said. “The federal government is not well-protected and the private sector is not well-protected. So the question is, how do we take some of the things that we've developed for the military side, scale them across the federal government. And the key question will be, how do we interact with the private sector. And that's the process we're trying to work through right now.”

Asked during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on threats if the U.S. government is prepared to deal with attacks on both civil and military networks, McConnell said: “Sir, we're not prepared to deal with it.”

A new initiative was launched in May to beef up cyber security, he said.

Non-state actors also pose a threat, he said, noting that terrorists are considering breaking in an destroying information.

“So while we haven't seen terrorist groups exhibit this kind of behavior as of yet, it's a tool set that's available to them, they're talking about, and I suspect at some point they will try to have that capability,” McConnell said.

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