Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said today that the United States executive branch of government faces “hundreds of thousands of [cyber] attacks every day” and revealed his fear that the nation has “not taken all the necessary steps” to avert a cyber attack disaster.
“I’ve got a hell of a lot to keep me awake at night,” Panetta told a Kentucky audience today. “I have to tell you that I do worry, however, about this new area I talked about of cyber-war. We are literally getting hundreds of thousands of attacks every day that try to exploit information in various agencies and departments and frankly throughout this country.”
Panetta believes “the capabilities are available in cyber to virtually cripple this nation, to bring down our power grid system, to impact on our governmental system . . . [to] paralyze this country.”
“So the one thing that I worry about the most right now is knowing that this is possible and feeling that we have not taken all the necessary steps to protect this country from that possibility,” he concluded.
