Thankfully, the United States government and the United States military is finally getting serious about Cyberwarfare, and the potential of serious threats to our economic infrastructure due to hackers, and foreign militaries attacking our systems. Yes, it is a real threat, one we have to deal with, and it doesn’t help that our government continually awards contracts to software providers for patchwork.

There are too many people in the know, who understand the code behind all these programs, and far too many coded programs working together in conjunction to make the entire system work, or in many cases not work at all. And the question is how do you fight a bunch of hackers who have very little money invested, and are maybe doing their hacking from a cybercafe somewhere in China?

If you think proxy terrorism is bad, consider a nation-state which is covertly funding groups of hackers in Eastern Europe, or patriotic hackers in China. It gets pretty serious pretty quick, and unfortunately our systems are vulnerable, and they have been attacked incessantly.

In a recent Lexington “Think Tank” Institute article by Loren Thompson PhD entitled; “What Force Multiplier? US Military Losing Cost-Exchange Advantage in Combat” which was published in October of 2010 brought up a very good point. Dr. Thompson in this paper stated;

“The U.S. is spending a billion dollars per month to protect its military and intelligence networks against penetration by overseas spies and hackers. The amount of money our enemies are putting into circumventing these protections is probably a very small fraction of that amount, and the cost of developing kinetic or non-kinetic means for disabling U.S. networks is quite modest.”

The cyber threat is real, and we’ve already been jeopardized by hackers, and our allies have been subject to cyber attacks from foreign militaries. Of course, there is also an offensive capability to this, in that we noted that Iran was attacked by someone, no one knows who, and everyone has denied the attack – nevertheless, it prevented their nuclear power plant from starting up. And this thought is rather scary, because all of our infrastructure in the US, as most of it runs on some sort of computer system.

We had better get our systems ready to combat cyber attacks, and hackers from destroying our world as we know it. Please consider all this, because if we don’t do something, we are all in trouble.