NATO Sees Cyber Warfare Threat

NATO considers cyber warfare as being as great a threat as a missile attack, officials say at a conference.

If you don’t think cyber warfare could be a major problem in the future, then NATO would like to change your mind. At a conference in London last week,Suleyman Anil, the man charged with guarding NATO from cyber attacks, told the Guardian, "Cyber defense is now mentioned at the highest level along withmissile defence and energy security. We have seen more of these attacks and we don’t think this problem will disappear soon. Unless globally supported measures are taken, it can become a globalproblem." Anil told the E-Crime congress that it was costing less for hackers to mount attacks, while the amount of damage they could inflict wasincreasing. The biggest trend of recent years is cyber terrorism, as shown by the attacks on Estonian government sites last year. But there have been many attacks, including those on government sitesin Australian and Britain and on the Pentagon. American officials believe they’re the work of a Chinese-sponsored group which they’ve dubbed Titan Rain. Of course, identifying the shadowypeople behind the attacks is almost impossible. But people in power do understand how real the threat is – the US government has allocated $6 billion to strengthen systems against attack.