Tagged: cyber attack

If cyber crime is a growth industry, so is fighting cyber crime.

The University of Washington Tacoma is the latest school to join the ranks of colleges and universities offering degrees in fighting cyber crooks.

Security professionals in both the U.S. government and in private industry have long feared the prospect of a cyberwar with China or Russia, two states capable of launching destructive attacks on the computer networks that control critical assets such as the power grid or the financial system.

Now they face a new cyberthreat: Iran.

"[The Iranians] have all the resources and the capabilities necessary to be a major player in terms of cyberwarfare," says Jeffrey Carr, an expert on cyberconflict who has consulted for the U.S. Department of Defense.

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state gets about 4 million cyber attacks a day. But workers there are just now getting back online after a sophisticated attack shut down most Internet services last Friday.

Remember when we used to call the Internet the "information superhighway"? Today, that highway is starting to resemble the route Mad Max traveled in The Road Warrior. You can't go out on it without inviting an attack. Hardly a week goes by without seeing news reports about another corporation being sabotaged by hackers ... Sony, Intel, Google, and Lockheed are some of the more high profile victims.

For consumers, the biggest cyber threat is identity theft and stolen credit card numbers. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. This month on The Digital Future, Strategic News Service publisher Mark Anderson looks at the huge increase in Advanced Persistent Threats: efforts by nation-states to steal information and technology.