While the nation is focused on the budget crisis, war and increasing gas prices, Assistant Director of the FBI’s Cyber Division Gordon M. Snow presented one more issue should be concerned about: cyber attacks.
Snow told the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism Tuesday, “U.S. critical infrastructure faces a growing cyber threat due to advancements in the availability and sophistication of malicious software tools.”
Our industrial control systems, “which operate the physical processes of the nation’s pipelines, railroads, and other critical infrastructures, are at elevated risk of cyber exploitation,” he said.
Snow warned, there is not enough protection to stop people from accessing personal home systems, businesses and much of our national infrastructure. Currently only advanced threat actors are capable of employing these techniques but “as we have seen with other malicious software tools, these capabilities will eventually be within reach of all threat actors.”
What does Snow mean? Well, any technologically savvy terrorist with the access, money and right software can launch a cyber war from his laptop any where in the world.
