netgarden’s posterous

Less than a decade ago, "60 Minutes" went to the Pentagon to do a story on something called information warfare, or cyber war as some people called it. It involved using computers and the Internet as weapons. Much of it was still theory, but we were told that before too long it might be possible for a hacker with a computer to disable critical infrastructure in a major city and disrupt essential services, to steal millions of dollars from banks all over the world, infiltrate defense systems, extort millions from public companies, and even sabotage our weapons systems.

Today it's not only possible, all of that has actually happened, plus a lot more we don't even know about.

"In 2007 we probably had our electronic Pearl Harbor. It was an espionage Pearl Harbor," Lewis said. "Some unknown foreign power, and honestly, we don't know who it is, broke into the Department of Defense, to the Department of State, the Department of Commerce, probably the Department of Energy, probably NASA. They broke into all of the high tech agencies, all of the military agencies, and downloaded terabytes of information."

How much is a terabyte? "The Library of Congress, which has millions of volumes, is about 12 terabytes. So, we probably lost the equivalent of a Library of Congress worth of government information in 2007," Lewis explained. "All stolen by foreign countries?" Kroft asked.

"Yeah. This was a serious attack. And that's really what made people wake up and say, 'Hey, we've got to get a grip on this,'" Lewis said.

Mark Notes: This is an incredible segment, both from perspective of how shocking this stuff is and from the integral-ness of our protecting our digital infrastructure as the strategic asset that it is.

Some Key Excerpts from the Segment:

• "I look at this as, like, a pre-9/11 moment. Where we identify a problem, we identify a threat, we know it exists, we know it's real, and we don't move quickly enough to fix the problem," Admiral McConnell, the recently retired director of national intelligence said. "And what I'm worried about is, because of so many competing priorities, and so many issues that we have to deal with, we won't get we, will not get focused on this problem until we have some catastrophic event."
• McConnell:"If the power grid was taken off line in the middle of winter, and it caused people to suffer and die, that would galvanize the nation. I hope we don't get there. But it's possible that we will." (As the story notes, this has already happened in Brazil.)
• Steve Kroft: "I know that people in the audience watching this are going to say, 'Could somebody steal money out of my bank account or could somebody attack a bank that would wipe out my life savings?'"  McConnell: "And the answer is yes, that's possible, but that is not the major problem. The more insidious issue is, what happens when the attacker is not attempting to steal money, but to destroy the process that accounts for money? That's the real issue we have to worry about." "It's all record keeping. It's accountability of the wealth and the movement of that money through the system that had to be reconciled at the speed of light. So if you impact or contaminate the data or destroy the data where you couldn't have reconciliation, you could have cascading impact in the banking system," he added.