Google cyber attacks a ‘wake-up’ call for US: Intelligence chief

WASHINGTON - The Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, has warned that the US could face a crippling cyber attack, as cyber threats grow in scope and sophistication.e said the computerized critical infrastructure of the US is “severely threatened” by malicious cyber attacks now occurring on an “unprecedented scale with extraordinary sophistication.”

Deposing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Blair said China’s action against search engine giant Google in the wake of hacker attacks on it, though largely unreported, could provide the wake-up call for the American government and private industry, whose computer networks he says are now under persistent and subtle assault.

Blair concluded:

Sensitive information is “stolen daily from both government and private sector networks.”

Investigations are finding “persistent, unauthorized, and at times unattributable presences on exploited networks, the hallmark of an unknown adversary….”

The US cannot be certain its cyberspace infrastructure will be available and reliable in a crisis.

The US and the world face greater vulnerability to disruption as a result of the trend toward convergence of voice, facsimile, video, computers, and controls that operate critical infrastructure on a single network: the internet. These include banking, power, and water supplies

Cyber threats are increasingly subtle and sophisticated. Last year saw the deployment of “self-modifying malware, which evolves to render traditional virus detection technologies less effective.”

Such attacks are already happening, confirmed Daniel Geer, chief information security officer for In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit venture capital firm funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, at a security conference for the oil and gas industry in Houston in November. Other cybersecurity experts cite a growing threat from so-called “polymorphic” spyware that can change its digital signature to millions of different combinations to evade identification by anti-virus software.

In this new scenario, a single piece of malware often has multiple characteristics. Its digital signatures can morph to evade detection. At the same time, it can spin off decoys intended to be caught to make it appear as if an attack has been thwarted.

“Many [of the most sophisticated attackers] have the capabilities to target elements of the US information infrastructure for intelligence collection, intellectual property theft, or isruption,” the Christian Science Monitor quoted Blair, as saying. (ANI)