Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Pentagon Pentagon: Cyber Attacks Can Count as Act of War

A new age of war.
the pentagon will have a tough go at even getting this off the ground, so many factors come into play that you have to consider when judging where a cyberattack originated.

Do I think that some cyberattacks are acts of war, hell yeah, a portion of them are directly targeted attacks and should be dealt with.
America is a little behind the times when it comes to fighting cyber warfare, when China actively recruits hackers to implement cyber attacks, why is the United States not doing the same?

Foxnews
WASHINGTON—The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.

The Pentagon's first formal cyber strategy, unclassified portions of which are expected to become public next month, represents an early attempt to grapple with a changing world in which a hacker could pose as significant a threat to U.S. nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines as a hostile country's military.

In part, the Pentagon intends its plan as a warning to potential adversaries of the consequences of attacking the U.S. in this way. "If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks," said a military official.

Recent attacks on the Pentagon's own systems—as well as the sabotaging of Iran's nuclear program via the Stuxnet computer worm—have given new urgency to U.S. efforts to develop a more formalized approach to cyber attacks. A key moment occurred in 2008, when at least one U.S. military computer system was penetrated. This weekend Lockheed Martin, a major military contractor, acknowledged that it had been the victim of an infiltration, while playing down its impact.

1 comment:

Online Home Inspector said...

Sounds like a warning to China and Russia. Perhaps cyber attacks are a bigger issue than we all realise, with those nations and others actively trying to breach everyone else's networks. That's not to say that blunt force could not create more problems than it solves. In the online world, can anyone be certain that they know where an attack actually came from?