The United States is losing enough data in cyber attacks to fill the Library of Congress many times over, and authorities have failed to stay ahead of the threat, a U.S. defense official said on Wednesday, Reuters reports. More than 100 foreign spy agencies were working to gain access to U.S. computer systems, as were criminal organizations, said James Miller, principal deputy under secretary of defense for policy. Terrorist groups also had cyber attack capabilities. “Our systems are probed thousands of times a day and scanned millions of times a day,” Miller told a forum sponsored by Ogilvy Washington, a public relations company. He said the evolving cyber threat had “outpaced our ability to defend against it.” “We are experiencing damaging penetrations — damaging in the sense of loss of information. And we don’t fully understand our vulnerabilities,” Miller said.
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U.S. House passes cyber-security scholarship bill
The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a cyber-security bill that calls for beefing up training, education, research, and coordination so the government can better prepare to deal with cyber attacks, CNET reports. The Cyber Security Research and Development Act of 2009, which passed by a vote of 422 to 5, authorizes the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop a cyber-security education program that can help consumers, businesses, schools, and government workers keep their computers secure. It also creates cyber-security scholarship programs for college students and research centers, and it asks NIST to boost the development of identity-management systems used to control access to buildings, computer networks, and data. Federal agencies spend $6 billion a year on cyber security to protect the government’s IT infrastructure and $356 million on research, according to the Office of Management and Budget. Despite that funding, a government review of its cyber-security efforts last year concluded that they are not adequate to prepare the country against cyber attacks…
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