[ISN] Cyberthreats: U.S. under attack every day, virtually

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/42142/108/

By Emory Kale    
TG Daily
April 23, 2009 

Washington, D.C. - In the post-9/11 world, Susan Brenner, an NCR 
professor of law and technology at the University of Dayton, worries 
about terrorists using cybercrime for their own purposes. This week, 
Defense Secretary Robert Gates told CBS News that the United States is 
"under cyber-attack virtually all the time, every day" and that the 
Defense Department plans to more than quadruple the number of cyber 
experts it employs to ward off such attacks. This is not your grandma's 
Internet.

U.S. citizens have lost over $400 billion to cybercrime, according to 
FBI estimates, and less than a third of cybercrimes are actually 
reported. The cyberhordes are not at the gates, yet, but some people 
believe that we need a wake-up call before it is too late.

Susan Brenner is a member of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, 
American Bar Association's International Cybercrime Project and the U.S. 
Department of Justice's National Forensic Science Technology Center 
Digital Evidence Project. She has served on the National District 
Attorneys Association's Committee on Cybercrimes and two Department of 
Justice digital evidence working groups. She addressed cyber-terrorism 
at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on cyberterrorism. Her 
cybercrimes Web site, law.udayton.edu/cybercrimes, was featured on "NBC 
Nightly News" and she's often quoted by national media about cyberlaw 
issues. She has also written a book called, "Cyberthreats: The Emerging 
Fault Lines of the Nation State," published recently by Oxford 
University Press, that outlines the threat facing the nation.

"With cyberthreats, it is difficult for the attacked to know the 
identity of the attacker or to determine the nature of the attack - 
whether war or crime or terrorism. If we don't know who is attacking, 
how do we counterattack? If we don't know whether the attack is a crime 
or an act of war, we don't know whether to use the police or the 
military," says Brenner, noting that the enemy is often invisible and 
that geography becomes irrelevant.

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