As Cyberwar Threat Looms, Officials Stay Mum

(Feb 3) -- The head of the intelligence community warned Congress this week that cyberwar is on the horizon, with terrorists and criminals exploiting new capabilities that could "wreak havoc" on the United States. The question now is, what does the U.S. government intend to do about it?

"Terrorist groups and their sympathizers have expressed interest in using cyber means to target the United States and its citizens," Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, warned a Senate panel Tuesday. Blair pointed to the recent attacks against Google as a "wake-up call."

But secrecy and bureaucracy make it difficult to figure out how much money the U.S. government is actually spending to combat the threat, or whether it is actually increasing. Intelligence spending devoted to cyberwarfare is classified, and the Obama administration did not provide a total figure on spending figures across the different agencies.

Only the Department of Homeland Security has articulated its spending plans, according to Christopher Bronk, a technology fellow at the Baker Institute at Rice University. "They are talking about $350 million, which seems kind of low," Bronk said. "You could spend 10 times that and still be short on responses."

On the surface, at least, cyberwarfare is getting big-time attention. The Navy this week announced it would build its own cybercommand, and the new U.S. Cyber Command was highlighted this year as a major new initiative in the Pentagon's budget request.

In the meantime, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon research arm that spurred development of the Internet, is funding a number of cybersecurity initiatives, such as a "cybergenome" project to track down the perpetrators of cyberattacks and a "cyber-authentication" program that would identify a computer user with remote sensors, rather than traditional passwords.

Conspicuously absent from the budget requests is any mention of the government's presumed work on its own cyberweapons for attacks on an enemy's computer network. That work has been kept deeply classified.

But with concerns over cyberattacks growing, some experts say it's not enough to expect the government to solve the problem. Earlier this week, researchers at the University of Cincinnati called for a public campaign on cybersecurity similar to the Cold War-era civil defense planning that spawned a boom in fallout shelters.

In their new paper, Richard J.Harknett and James A. Stever compare preparations for nuclear war with cyberwar.

Though they note that the threat of nuclear annihilation soon overwhelmed the ability of the civilian population to make reasonable preparations, they argue that cyberwar is different. "The ubiquity of computer technology throughout the civilian population will require full societal engagement if the national objective is a secure cyberspace," they write.