The New Generation of Security Threats

Source: Elise Cooper, American Thinker.

“In Newt Gingrich’s latest book, To Save America, he reflects on the five potentially catastrophic threats to the United States. Gingrich lists the threats as “Terrorists with nuclear weapons, Electromagnetic pulse attack, Cyber warfare, Biological warfare, and the potential gap between Chinese and American capabilities.” Gingrich stated to American Thinker that “there is a definite need to understand your opponent. We cannot greatly under estimate the enemy, who can be very smart and very dangerous.”

Townsend sees “Russia and China as the most aggressive adversaries in the cyber arena. They have tremendous capability and probe our systems both in government and commercially. China is using their intelligence capabilities to ping our cyber systems to steal commercial information, and we don’t call them on that, either.” Americans should look no further than the recent cyber-attacks against Google, which underscore Townsend’s point. Google threatened to pull out of China after it learned of a “sophisticated and targeted” cyber-attack that would have gained access to the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The Chinese officials kept pushing Google to conform to their will. They wanted only favorable news and the names of Google users who searched for unapproved topics. Yet, the most outrageous demand was to be allowed to spy on Google’s American customers, after which they attempted to hack into hundreds of American corporations. The cyber-Cold War espionage waged by China shows the dangers and the need for an ongoing solution.

A lot of the capabilities and resources in solving this problem are with the private sector. There must be a partnership between the government and industry where they share information capabilities. Since every six months the cyber industry is evolving, with the infrastructure quickly becoming obsolete, solutions must evolve as well.”