Hackers of the world, beware, said Siobhan Gorman and Julian E. Barnes in The Wall Street Journal. The Pentagon is fed up and is not going to take it anymore. Alarmed by the increasingly sophisticated hacking of the computer systems of American companies and the U.S. government itself, the Pentagon is creating a new national strategy that would classify serious cyberattacks as acts of war, meriting a traditional military retaliation. “If you shut down our power grid,” said one military official, “maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks.” In an era when nearly everything is controlled by computers, this new policy is “long overdue,” said The Kansas City Star in an editorial. Russia is widely thought to have breached U.S. military computer systems in 2008, while Chinese hackers penetrated Google’s servers last year. Lockheed Martin, one of our largest military contractors, recently admitted its computer system had been infiltrated by an unknown hacker.
The threat that cyberwarfare poses is enormous, said Con Coughlin in the London Telegraph. Hostile regimes such as China and Russia now employ hundreds of sophisticated hackers to probe the West’s computer systems. It’s possible that enemy nations, or terrorists, could shut down power grids, plunging entire regions into darkness, or create havoc with water and natural gas supplies, or shut down banks and stock markets. In fact, one intelligence source told me, the consequences of a cyberattack could be more devastating “than an al Qaida dirty nuclear bomb.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
