As I was driving back from North Laurel this afternoon I happened to catch the latest episode of Fresh Air with Terry Gross on NPR. Her guest today was Richard Clarke, the National Coordinator for Counterterrorism in both the Clinton and Bush administrations. He has written a book entitled “Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to do About It.”At the top of the program Terry mentioned the creation of the new Cyber Command and mentioned Lt. General Keith Alexander’s comment last Thursday that “computer networks essential to the Pentagon and military are attacked by individual hackers, criminal groups and nations hundreds of thousands of times every day.”
Clarke warns that while the military is gearing up for this threat, private industry remains vulnerable.
"The Pentagon is all over this," he says. "The Pentagon has created a four-star general command called Cyber Command, which is a military organization with thousands of people in it to go to war using these [cyber]weapons. And also, Cyber Command's job is to defend the Pentagon. Now, who's defending us? Who's defending those pipelines and the railroads and the banks? The Obama administration's answer is pretty much, 'You're on your own,' that Cyber Command will defend our military, Homeland Security will someday have the capability to defend the rest of the civilian government -- it doesn't today -- but everybody else will have to do their own defense. That is a formula that will not work in the face of sophisticated threats."
He offered that this akin to telling the steel factories during World II that they’d have to defend themselves.
It may not have been as entertaining as the last Fresh Air program I wrote about but it certainly was more informative and timely.
You can listen to the complete show here
