uncompiled.com

There may be no country on the planet more vulnerable to a massive cyberattack than the United States, where financial, transportation, telecommunications and even military operations are now deeply dependent on data networking.

What’s worse: U.S. security officials say the country’s cyberdefenses are not up to the challenge. In part, it’s due to a severe shortage of computer security specialists and engineers with the skills and knowledge necessary to do battle against would-be adversaries. The protection of U.S. computer systems essentially requires an army of cyberwarriors, but the recruitment of that force is suffering.

“We don’t have sufficiently bright people moving into this field to support those national security objectives as we move forward in time,” says James Gosler, a veteran cybersecurity specialist who has worked at the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Energy Department.

If U.S. cyberdefenses are to be improved, more people like Gosler will be needed on the front lines. Gosler, 58, works at the Energy Department’s Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M., where he focuses on ways to counter efforts to penetrate U.S. data networks. It’s an ever-increasing challenge.

“You can have vulnerabilities in the fundamentals of the technology, you can have vulnerabilities introduced based on how that technology is implemented, and you can have vulnerabilities introduced through the artificial applications that are built on that fundamental technology,” Gosler says. “It takes a very skilled person to operate at that level, and we don’t have enough of them.”

Gosler estimates there are now only 1,000 people in the entire United States with the sophisticated skills needed for the most demanding cyberdefense tasks. To meet the computer security needs of U.S. government agencies and large corporations, he says, a force of 20,000 to 30,000 similarly skilled specialists is needed.

Some are currently being trained at the nonprofit SANS (SysAdmin, Audit, Network, Security) Institute outside Washington, D.C., but the demand for qualified cybersecurity specialists far exceeds the supply.

“You go looking for those people, but everybody else is looking for the same thousand people,” says SANS Research Director Alan Paller. “So they’re just being pushed around from NSA to CIA to DHS to Boeing. It’s a mess.”

The Center for Strategic and International Studies highlights the problem in a forthcoming report, “A Human Capital Crisis in Cybersecurity.”

According to the report, a key element of a “robust” cybersecurity strategy is “having the right people at every level to identify, build and staff the defenses and responses.”

The CSIS report highlights a “desperate shortage” of people with the skills to “design secure systems, write safe computer code, and create the ever more sophisticated tools needed to prevent, detect, mitigate and reconstitute from damage due to system failures and malicious acts.”

The cyber manpower crisis in the United States stands in sharp contrast to the situation in China, where the training of computer experts is a top national priority. In the most recent round of the International Collegiate Programming Contest, co-sponsored by IBM and the Association for Computing Machinery, Chinese universities took four of the top 10 places. No U.S. university made the list.

The Chinese government, in fact, appears to be systematically building a cyberwarrior force.

“Every military district of the Peoples’ Liberation Army runs a competition every spring,” says Alan Paller of SANS, “and they search for kids who might have gotten caught hacking.”

One of the Chinese youths who won that competition had earlier been caught hacking into a Japanese computer, according to Paller, only to be rewarded with extra training.

“Later that year, we found him hacking into the Pentagon,” Paller says. “So they find them, they train them, and they get them into operation very, very fast.”

Some members of Congress, eager to follow China’s example, are now promoting a U.S. Cyber Challenge, a national talent search at the high school level. The aim is to find up to 10,000 potential cyberwarriors, ready to play both offense and defense.

“The idea is for schools around the country to field teams, and the teams would compete against one another,” says Sen. Thomas Carper, a Delaware Democrat who is one of the backers of the effort. He sees the challenge as an opportunity “not only for them to hone their skills on being able to hack into other systems, particularly those of folks we may not be fond of, but also to use what they learn to strengthen our defenses.”

In order to protect a computer system, one needs to know how someone might attack it. Last year’s preliminary Cyber Challenge game was won by a 17-year-old from Connecticut — Michael Coppola — who was smart enough to hack into the game computer and add points to his own score.

“There’s actually a flaw within that Web application,” Coppola says. “Using that, I was able to execute commands on the computer running the scoring software, and I was able to add points and basically do whatever I wanted.”

It was certainly an unconventional approach, but the competition judges were so impressed by Coppola’s ability to hack into the computer game that they actually rewarded him for changing his score.

“It’s cheating,” Michael says, “but it’s like the entire game is cheating.”

Indeed. People who know how to cheat will soon be on the front lines of cyber defense, because the best way to defend a computer system from attack is to figure out how an adversary would be able to hack into it.

Now 18, Coppola is himself looking to a career in cybersecurity.

Source

North Korea was behind the cyber attacks that occurred a year ago Wednesday, according to a government IT source in South Korea.
The distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks paralyzed more than 20 domestic sites including those of the presidential office and major portal sites.

On foreign media reports saying no evidence linked the North to the attacks, Jeong Seok-hwa, investigation director at the Cyber Terror Response Center in charge of the investigation, said, “No country including the U.S. could identify the origin of the DDoS attacks that occurred a year ago. Thankfully, the discovery by Korean investigation agencies has been the most credible so far.”

On how he was sure that it was Pyongyang, Jeong said, “It might be too early to conclude this, but the facts so far have shown that the IP address used for the attacks was the same one rented by North Korea’s Posts and Telecommunications Ministry from a Chinese Internet provider.”

“The attack was waged by dozens of people, not one individual,” he added.

According to the National Police Agency, the cyber center in October last year found that the attacks originated from the IP of the North’s ministry.

A lieutenant on the investigation team was promoted to inspector in recognition of this discovery. He refused to disclose more, however, saying “Giving out more details will compromise our national strategy,” but added, “It was possible thanks to the technical capability we’ve accumulated for more than 10 years since the cyber center’s launch.”

Amid rising fears over a second cyber attack from the North, Jeong said, “Attack rumors were prevalent in April and May, but nothing really happened. But there certainly is the possibility of another attack. One of the servers that made the attack order seems to have copied all files saved on zombie PCs, or those in charge of the attack.”

This indicates that zombie PCs analyzed the files South Koreans frequently use to make more of them when starting an attack.

On preventing a cyber attack, Jeong said, “We cannot prevent zombie PCs from multiplying even with the latest vaccine program. The government must distribute free firewall programs (used for protection in Internet banking services).

With the investigation over last year’s cyber attacks ongoing, Jeong pledged to find the culprit. “We’ve done everything we can within the country. Since the attack originated from China, which is beyond our investigative jurisdiction, we will collaborate with China to find who did it,” he said.

Source

Millions of documents stored at the World War II code-breaking centre, Bletchley Park, are set to be digitised and made available online.

Electronics company Hewlett-Packard has donated a number of scanners to the centre in Milton Keynes so volunteers can begin the ground-breaking task.

Many of the records at the once-secret centre have not been touched for years.

During the war, it was home to more than 10,000 men and women who decoded encrypted German messages.

The centre hopes that once the work starts, previously untold stories about the role Bletchley Park played in the war, will be revealed.

‘Trail’
The first phase of the project is expected to take at least three years.

Simon Greenish, chief executive officer of the Bletchley Park Trust, said the plan was for the centre’s entire archive to be digitised.

He said: “We’ve been wanting to do this for a while. It was first discussed five years ago, but we have just never had the funds.

“If I ever manage to secure £10,000 then that goes towards buying a new roof as this project just has not had the attention it deserves.

“But for the first time we hope we will be able to put everything into the public domain.”

He said since the archive is so big nobody knows exactly what each individual document stored there contains.

However, the information they expect to dig out will definitely include communication transcripts, communiques, memoranda, photographs, maps and other material relating to key events that took place during the war.

He said: “We have many boxes full of index cards, which have lots of different messages on them. But this will be our chance to follow a trail and put the messages together so we can find out what they really mean.

“We found a card talking about 4,400 tonnes of mercury being transferred from Spain – we will be searching for further messages explaining what happened and why this was done.”

He said the archive had tremendous potential and once it was online, people would find it easier to trace documents related to certain subjects within minutes – something that takes days to do now.

Pictures set to go online in the archive include ones of Adolf Hitler shortly after surviving an attempt to assassinate him. They had been taken by his official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann.

“I’m looking toward to finding the cards relating to rubber and ball bearings and how the Germans gathered these materials.

“The Germans developed synthetic rubber as they found it hard to get natural rubber. They also needed lots of ball bearings for the war effort, which is why the allied forces attacked a lot of ball bearing factories.”

He said there were records in the archive which showed countries such as Spain, Switzerland and Sweden were perhaps not as neutral as they were portrayed.

“It is quite clear there was a lot of correspondence going on between these countries,” he said.

He said the volunteers had already unearthed records showing countries including Spain dealing in diamonds with the Japanese and other German allies.

He said more information about the double agent Garbo – a Spaniard whose real name was Juan Pujol Garcia – was likely to come out once the work on the archive began.

Garbo, who has been described as World War II’s “greatest double agent”, persuaded the Nazis that the allied forces were planning their D-Day operation in Calais rather than Normandy.

He said he was also expecting more information about the fuel the Germans were discovered to be sending to Pennemuende, a small village close to the Baltic Sea.

He said: “We didn’t know anything about it initially, but then because of the message that Bletchley Park decoded, the allies sent a reconnaissance aircraft and they found out that rockets – weapons of terror – were being developed there. The RAF then attacked the site.”

He said the documents were all important as just one obscure message could have led to thousands of lives being saved.

Laura Seymour, from Hewlett-Packard, said her company contacted Bletchley Park in September 2009 after learning of its plight.

The company donated a number of scanners and people to provide technical expertise to the charity.

Ms Seymour estimated the cost to HP was in the tens of thousands but said it was a project that was worth being involved in.

Mr Greenish believed the archive would be an important research tool and could even attract more people to the site. It would also ensure the preservation of the fragile hard copies.

Currently most of the documents are too difficult to view or handle and few have access to them. But Bletchley Park hopes that its new archive will one day be a different type of gateway to the past.

Source

Unauthorized users penetrate Pentagon networks over six million times a day, says the head of the US Cyber Command, urging US military to guard against cyber attacks.

General Keith Alexander cautioned that Pentagon systems are “probed by unauthorized users approximately 250,000 times an hour, over six million times a day.” The remarks by Alexander, who is also at the helm of the main US spy organizations, the National Security Agency, was made in a Thursday address to a major Washington policy think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“Our nation’s interests are in jeopardy,” he said citing “tremendous vulnerabilities” and threats from a “growing array of foreign actors, terrorists, criminal groups and individual hackers.”

Alexander emphasized that his main priority was to develop a real time picture of threats to US military networks and devising rules to fight back by conducting cyber attacks against enemies.

Alexander said that US military “depends on its networks for command and control, communications, intelligence, operations and logistics.”

“We at the Department of Defense have more than seven million machines to protect linked-in 15,000 networks,” he noted.

Source

A US military analyst, Bradley Manning, has been arrested on suspicion of leaking classified combat video and documents to a whistle-blower website.

Specialist Manning, 22, was detained during a tour of duty in Iraq, and is being held in Kuwait pending further investigations.

The WikiLeaks website posted a video which it says shows the US military shooting civilians in Baghdad in 2007.

It has not confirmed Spc Manning as its source for the helicopter footage.

News of his arrest first broke on the Wired.com website.

A former hacker said he had turned the analyst in out of concern for US national security.

‘Boasting’ about leaks
In a statement, the US army in Iraq said Spc Manning was “placed in pre-trial confinement for allegedly releasing classified information”.

WikiLeaks’ organisers said they were given the footage, which they said came from cameras on US Apache helicopters.

They said they decrypted it, but would not reveal who gave it to them.

The WikiLeaks site campaigns for freedom of information and posts leaked documents online.

The ex-hacker, Adrian Lamo, said Spc Manning “boasted” to him about passing the helicopter video to WikiLeaks.

Mr Lamo said Spc Manning claimed to have leaked video footage showing an air strike in Afghanistan in July 2009. The local authorities said nearly 100 people were killed in the attack at Garani

Spc Manning also said he had passed on 260,000 classified US diplomatic cables.

However, WikiLeaks has said it was not sent the diplomatic cables.

“A lot of people have labelled me a snitch,” Mr Lamo told BBC News. “I guess I deserve that on this one but not as a generality.”

Child casualties
The video from Iraq shows a US helicopter strike in July 2007 in which about 12 people died.

On the transmission, US soldiers on the ground can be heard establishing that there are two child casualties and agreeing to take them to hospital.

The Pentagon has not disputed the authenticity of the video but has been working to trace the source.

At the time, the US military said the helicopters were engaged in combat operations against a hostile force.

Source

During World War II, Britain’s brightest minds routinely decoded encrypted German military messages, an effort believed to have significantly shortened the war and saved the country further devastation.

The mathematicians and cryptography experts at Bletchley Park broke the code used by Germany’s Enigma machine, a complex encryption device used across the German military. By January 1940, Britain was decoding the majority of the Enigma-encrypted radio messages intercepted by its signal intelligence stations.

Since then, buildings on the 25-acre Bletchley Park estate have fallen into disrepair: At one stage the site was close to being demolished to make way for a supermarket and housing development, and efforts to raise money to preserve it have struggled.

Existing funds have been consumed by emergency infrastructure repairs such as keeping the roofs of buildings from caving in, said Simon Greenish, director and CEO of Bletchley Park Trust. Preserving the core of Bletchley Park’s heritage — the intercepted messages — was far down the list of priorities, he said.

Those messages are still in the building’s archive after more than six decades, neatly typed on trimmed slips of paper and glued into fragile, decaying books. Also in the archive are drawers full of maps and a system of index cards used to classify messages by subject.

With the archive building’s roof among those that needed fixing earlier this year, the flimsy documents stored there “really ought to be properly dealt with,” Greenish said.

That is starting to happen, with the launch of a project to digitize the documents in the archive and make them accessible to the public.

Hewlett-Packard has donated servers, storage and five of its latest enterprise-level Scanjet scanners to get the project going, said Laura Seymour, marketing manager for HP’s LaserJet and enterprise solutions. The company has also assigned consultants to help train volunteers and Bletchley staff on the equipment.

Volunteers will use HP’s Scanjet 7000 to scan the index cards used to classify messages. Once the cryptanalysts had decoded a message, a summary of it would be written on an index card and filed under a subject heading to make it easy to find groups of related messages. The cards — which number in the tens of thousands — are handwritten in cursive, often on both sides.

The Scanjet 7000 can scan both sides of the cards quickly in batches. The scanner can detect if a card has been incorrectly fed or if two cards are stuck together. A larger flatbed scanner, such as HP’s N9120, will be used for the books containing the actual messages. The pages of those books will have to be turned by hand in order to scan them since they are too fragile for automated page-turning scanners.

Another bit of technology can help compensate if an index card’s writing is fading. HP’s Kofax Virtual rescan software inspects the material, then adjusts its brightness and contrast for clarity so that the image is more readable, said Mander Thiara, a specialist with HP’s imaging and printing group.

Source

With Army Gen. Keith Alexander named as its first commander, U.S. Cyber Command has a challenging mission and Alexander a demanding job.

Receiving a promotion to four-star general, Alexander on Friday was officially given the reins of U.S. Cyber Command by Defense Secretary Robert Gates during a ceremony in Fort Meade, Md. That signaled the initial launch of the division, which won’t be up to full capability until October 1.

The mission of U.S. Cyber Command, or CyberCom, is to synchronize the Defense Department’s various networks and cyberspace operations to better defend them against the onslaught of cyberattacks.

“Given our increasing dependency on cyberspace, this new command will bring together the resources of the department to address vulnerabilities and meet the ever-growing array of cyberthreats to our military systems,” Gates said in a statement.

Last June, Gates approved the birth of Cyber Command as a unified, subdivision of U.S. Strategic Command to manage the Defense Department’s resources of 15,000 computer networks across 4,000 military bases in 88 countries. The launching of U.S. CyberCom had been stalled, awaiting Senate confirmation of Alexander. But with Senate approval having been cleared on May 7, CyberCom is now free to open for business.

About 1,000 people will work at CyberCom at Fort Meade, with most of them moving over from existing jobs.

Concerns have been raised, notably by Air Force Gen. Kevin Chilton–the commander of U.S. Strategic Command–over the segregation that currently exists among the different cybernetworks and information resources across the military.

“This segregation detracts from natural synergies and ignores our experience in organizing to operate in the air, land, sea, and space domains,” Gates said before the House Armed Services Committee in March. “The establishment of U.S. CyberCom will remedy this problem in the cyberdomain.”

To integrate the military’s vast cyber-resources, Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn III has spearheaded the effort to launch CyberCom. With the U.S. military more dependent on information technology than forces in other countries, Lynn believes the military must be able to safeguard its own networks and be free to utilize them across the world.

“We want to be able to maintain those advantages and protect the military missions, and that is the main mission of Cyber Command; it is to protect the military networks,” Lynn said in a statement. “It will have a role, though, in protecting the government’s networks and critical infrastructure.”

Coordinating all of the disparate agencies with a role in cyberdefense has been a huge challenge, as different groups in government have struggled to map out their own agendas. But Lynn seems optimistic that CyberCom can also help clean up some of the bureaucratic snafus and turf wars.

“It will be the place where the Department of Homeland Security will come to on cybersecurity matters,” Lynn said. “And it will help rationalize the interagency process.”

Since the initial inception of CyberCom almost a year ago, the military has been busy prepping it for launch, according to Lynn. People have been trained, task forces have been set up, investments have been made. Officials from the DOD have also worked with defense companies to focus on both cyberthreats and best practices. Lynn himself has traveled to Great Britain and Australia and will go to Canada to discuss how best to share common threats and technologies.

Questions still remain about the muddy legal waters of cybersecurity. What is considered a cyberattack? How do countries respond to them?
“We’re in the midst of a series of meetings the White House is leading to work through a lot of those legal issues,” Lynn said. “We’ve made progress organizationally, industrially, and internationally, but the legal regime in particular is an area we need to tackle further.”
But other challenges await the new Cyber Command, especially with the growing threat of cyberattacks.

“It doesn’t take the resources of a nation state to launch cyberwar, “noted Lynn. “Nations still have the best capabilities, but you can do very threatening and damaging things with modest investments…Our ability to predict where the threats are coming [from], even in conventional threats, is remarkably poor. We didn’t see Desert Storm coming. We didn’t see the series of events that led to Afghanistan. Foreseeing the threats in cyberspace is harder. With Cyber Command, I think we need to be prepared for the unexpected.”

Source

Engineers with the Air Force Center for Engineering and the Environment have begun construction on the new 38,000 square-foot cyber warfare command center. The facility will be home for the 68th Network Warfare Squadron and the 710th Information Operations Flight currently located at Brooks City-Base in San Antonio.

Officials from the 68th NWS recently held a groundbreaking ceremony to officially commence construction. It is scheduled to be completed this fall.

“This building will be the first of its kind in the nation, as well as the first step in the new warfare, cyber warfare,” said Col. Bradford Shwedo, 68th NWS commander.

Air Force officials chose Lackland AFB to be the hub of cyber command operations. One reason was because of its proximity to other cyber-related commands such as the National Security Agency’s Texas Cryptologic Center; the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Agency; the 67th Network Warfare Wing; the Joint Information Operations Warfare Command; and the Air Force Cryptologic Support Group.

The facility’s construction is one of the base realignment and closure projects being managed and executed through AFCEE and constructed by TolTest, Inc.

The BRAC commission is a federal entity set up to review the assets and property of military installations, close excess bases and realign operations and resources to maximize tax payer dollars.

The building, which will serve as an office building for 400 employees, will be designed and constructed in accordance with Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design requirements. LEED is a goal-oriented approach to the design, construction, and operation of “green” buildings. LEED certification requires the facilities built have environmentally friendly features, use recyclable materials when possible, and use energy efficient lighting and appliances.

“We are excited about the opportunity to design and construct the intelligence operations center for the Air Force Reserve Command and the Air Force Space Command, which will be essential to the execution of their cyber warfare capabilities,” said AFCEE project manager Mark Stough.

Source

The US government, after some delay, has formally confirmed in post the head of its now-forming military Cyber Command. Keith B Alexander, head of the NSA, has been promoted to four-star general* and will now head the new cyber forces as well as his current agency.

The Cyber Command will be based alongside the NSA, perhaps the world’s most powerful crypto and intercept agency, at Fort Meade in Maryland.

The new command, which will be subordinate to US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), was created last June and it was hoped that Alexander would be in post before now. However, in the USA top jobs of this sort must be confirmed by Congress and in this case the legislators took their time. Many expressed concerns over control of the possible offensive capabilities of the nascent US military cyber forces, or worried that they might present threats to Americans’ privacy or civil liberties.

Alexander, during his confirmation hearings, stressed that in his view the cyber forces’ mission was primarily that of protecting American networks rather than striking at those of others.

“This command is not about an effort to militarize cyberspace,” he said at a Washington hearing last month. “Rather, it’s about safeguarding our military assets.”

Specifically, according to the Department of Defense, Cyber Command will be responsible for securing and policing the .mil domain. The wider .gov domain is the responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security.

“We are pleased that the Senate has moved forward with his confirmation,” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said in a statement issued yesterday. “General Alexander brings to the job the leadership to stand up this command, and the skills and expertise that will be critical to the new command in dealing with security challenges in the cyber domain.”

The separate US services are setting up their own cyber forces too, and are expected to draw heavily on NSA/Cyber Command expertise and doctrine. The US Navy cyber force is the 10th Fleet; the US 24th Air Force is also in the process of forming up. The cyber airmen have lately announced the creation of a “cyber wings” chest badge to be worn by qualified digital warriors.

Despite Alexander’s soothing talk of network defence, there is no doubt that the US cyber forces are also developing the capability to do unto others. One of the main sub-units of the 24th AF, for instance, is the 67th Network Warfare Wing – whose stated mission is to “execute computer network exploitation and attack” as required. It is also worth noting that Pentagon tech agency DARPA is currently developing a “Cyber Range” in which to test-fire the terrible digital weapons of tomorrow.

The NSA probably has some interesting capabilities already. Not everyone always remembers this, owing to its large number of civilian employees and its involvement in crypto standards used almost universally in commercial IT, but the NSA has always been an arm of the US military. Formally it is a “combat support agency” of the DoD. ®

Bootnote
*Full general, as opposed to a mere lieutenant-general (three stars), major-general (two stars – yes, a major-general is junior to a lieutenant-general, it’s because once upon a time the rank was sergeant-major-general) or brigadier (one star).

The USA still has five-star generals too, equivalent to the now disused British rank of field-marshal.

Source

WASHINGTON — The U.S. must fire back against cyber attacks swiftly and strongly and should act to counter or disable a threat even when the identity of the attacker is unknown, the director of the National Security Agency told Congress.

Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, who is the Obama administration’s nominee to take on additional duties as head of the new Cyber Command, also said the U.S. should not be deterred from taking action against countries such as Iran and North Korea just because they might launch cyber attacks.

“Even with the clear understanding that we could experience damage to our infrastructure, we must be prepared to fight through in the worst case scenario,” Alexander said in a Senate document obtained by The Associated Press.

Alexander’s answers reflect the murky nature of the Internet and the escalating threat of cyber terrorism, which defies borders, operates at the speed of light and can provide deep cover for assailants who can launch disruptive attacks from continents away, using networks of innocent computers.

The three-star Army general laid out his views on Cyber Command and the military’s role in protecting computer networks in a 32-page Senate questionnaire. He answered the questions in preparation for a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Thursday on his nomination to head Cyber Command.

U.S. computer networks are under constant attack, and President Barack Obama last year declared that the cyber threat is one of nation’s most serious economic and national security challenges.

Alexander offered a limited but rare description of offensive U.S. cyber activities, saying the U.S. has “responded to threats, intrusions and even attacks against us in cyberspace,” and has conducted exercises and war games.

It’s unclear, Alexander added, whether or not those actions have deterred criminals, terrorists or nations.

In cyberspace, he said, it is difficult to deliver an effective response if the attacker’s identity is not known.

But commanders have clear rights to self-defense, he said. He added that while “this right has not been specifically established by legal precedent to apply to attacks in cyberspace, it is reasonable to assume that returning fire in cyberspace, as long as it complied with law of war principles … would be lawful.”

Senators noted, in their questions, that police officers don’t have to know the identity of a shooter in order to shoot back. In cyberspace, the U.S. may be able to counter a threat, rebuff an electronic probe or disable a malicious network without knowing who is behind the attack.

The nation’s ability to protect its networks and launch counterattacks, however, is shrouded in secrecy. Alexander gave the panel a separate classified attachment that provided more details on how and when the military would launch cyber attacks and under what legal and command authorities.

Among the classified responses was his answer to whether the U.S. should first ask another government to deal with a cyber attack that came from within its borders.
He repeatedly stressed that any U.S. response to a cyber attack must be authorized by the president and must conform to international law and guiding military principles. Those guidelines require that the reaction be deemed militarily necessary and in proportion to the attack.

Noting that there is no international consensus on the definition of use of force, in or out of cyberspace, Alexander said uncertainty creates the potential for disagreements among nations.

Alexander echoed other experts who warn that the U.S. is unprepared for a cyber attack. He said the first priority is to make sure the nation can defend its networks, which are now a “strategic vulnerability.”

Alexander said the biggest challenge facing the development of Cyber Command will be improving the defense of military networks, which will require better real-time knowledge of intrusions.

He added that it will be difficult for the military to gain superiority in cyberspace, but the goal is “realistic.”
Alexander, 58, is a native of Syracuse, N.Y., and a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy.

Source