The administration wants Americans to think before they click.<\/p>\n
Know who’s on the other side of that instant message. What someone says or does in cyberspace stays in cyberspace – for many to see, steal and use against people and their government.<\/p>\n
The Internet, said former national intelligence director Michael McConnell, “is the soft underbelly” of the U.S. today. Speaking recently at a new cybersecurity exhibit at the International Spy Museum in Washington, McConnell said the Internet has “introduced a level of vulnerability that is unprecedented.”<\/p>\n
The Pentagon’s computer systems are probed 360 million times a day, and one prominent power company has acknowledged that its networks see up to 70,000 scans a day, according to cybersecurity expert James Lewis.<\/p>\n
For the most part, those probes of government and critical infrastructure networks are benign. Many, said McConnell, are a nuisance and some are crimes. But the most dangerous are probes aimed at espionage or tampering with or destroying data.<\/p>\n
The attackers could be terrorists aiming at the U.S. culture and economy, or nation-states looking to insert malicious computer code into the electrical grid that could be activated weeks or years from now.<\/p>\n
“We are the fat kid in the race,” said Lewis. “We are the biggest target, we have the most to steal, and everybody wants to get us.”<\/p>\n
Steps to improve computer security at home include:<\/p>\n