United States Losing Cyberwar

The US Commission on Cybersecurity, in a 44 paged report, says the US “faces a cybersecurity threat of such magnitude that the next President should move quickly to create a Center for Cybersecurity Operations and appoint a special White House advisor to oversee it.” The report will be made public today.

The panel is a bi-partisan group which includes high ranking military officials, executives and intelligence officials. According to Business Week, “commission members say they reviewed tens of thousands of pages of undisclosed documentation, visited forensics labs and the National Security Agency, and were briefed in closed-door sessions by top officials from Pentagon, CIA, and British spy agency MI5. From their research, they concluded that the U.S. badly needs a comprehensive cybersecurity policy to replace an outdated checklist of security requirements for government agencies under the existing Federal Information Security Management Act.”

Some of the major areas of concern that the report details are (1) the Secretary of Defense’s un-classified email was hacked (2) the State Department has lost terabytes of information (3) Homeland Security has suffered several “break-ins” (4) NASA has had email restrictions go out pre-launch due to some designs allegedly being compromised and (5) the White House has had unidentifiable intrusions on its network.

President-elect Obama seems to be onboard with the report’s recommendations.