Cyber Attacks Test Pentagon, Allies and Foes

Siobhan Gorman and Stephen Fidler, Wall Street Journal.

Adversarial nations worldwide have adopted cyberespionage and cyberattacks as staples of modern warfare, and U.S. defense officials estimate that more than 100 countries are currently attempting to penetrate U.S. networks, with the greatest concentration of attacks based in China and Russia.

U.S. military and civilian networks are probed thousands of times a day, and the systems of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters are attacked at least 100 times a day, according to Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO’s secretary-general. “It’s no exaggeration to say that cyber attacks have become a new form of permanent, low-level warfare,” he said.

Although the Pentagon’s Cyber Command is slated to be fully operational in October, cybersecurity experts warn that much of the rest of the U.S. government has fallen behind as it argues over the duties of different agencies.

One source reports that NATO’s systems are behind those of the United States in terms of cyberdefense, noting that NATO delayed installing many of the basic network security patches because it had decided some of its computers were too critical to ever deactivate. NATO’s systems are behind the U.S.’s, said one person familiar with U.S. assessments of NATO’s systems after a recent trip the deputy defense secretary made there. “The Chinese totally owned them,” this person said.

Meanwhile, many nations have developed cyberoffensive capabilities that can repeatedly breach and lay waste to computer networks, according to cybersecurity specialists. The expansion of the threat of cyberattacks is spurring calls for an international accord to limit them. The International Institute of Strategic Studies’ Nigel Inkster says that such a pact needs to establish thresholds beyond which a cyberattack would be designated an act of aggression.  WSJ article

DCL: so this is what some of our event processing colleagues are doing?