U.S. Air Force prepares to fight in Cyberspace

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Air Force said Thursday it was setting up what could become a new four-star command to fight in cyberspace, where officials say the United States has already come under attack from China among others.

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All i can say is it's about time, not only do we need to protect ourselves but its a good idea to have the ability of keeping modern militaries from using their most modern weapons. Perhaps we should be looking more into economic warfare more as well what do you guys think?

Getting the military involved in defending cyberspace, IMHO would make little difference as Microsoft, IBM, Symantec and many other software firms, not to mention all the open-source gurus, have the best IT minds already working on the same problems. On top of all this, $8.40 out of every $100 in an average organization's IT budget goes toward IT security.

[www.cio.com...]


Economic warfare is a very taboo subject, the last thing a government would want to do is initiate this type of warfare, because the floodgates would open.

Well carried out attacks would cripple the information systems that our modern economies run on, the banking sector would very near collapse, international trade as we know it today would cease, all of this would lead to a complete loss of investor confidence, which in turn would lead to a stock market crash.

Economies are very fragile things.

I wonder why lol, great points man.

Fighting in Cyberspace is considered Information Warfare. Information Warfare is handled by US Strategic Command (of which the Air Force is a component).

Tim

The hackers will own them. It's not like they can take there F-22's into cyber space and own our computers

I think the secret to cyberwarfare is a really good computer wiz. Things like Computer Viruses, Worms, Trojan Horses, ect. are probable a part of Cyberwarfare as is hacking.

Tim

Why don't we form an internet military..mwahaha

Recruit all the best hackers and mess up China..that'd be awesome


Anyways..

What do you think the possibility is of this cyber war getting so bad that it escalates into an actual war?

omg if they win the dDoS attack we'll have to surrender by dawn

what a joke i'm sorry, but Virtual Reality conflicts are won by pulling the offender's plug. try to hack your way out of a prison cell if you know what i mean. the only result will be that the average internet user will be chased by hackers and hacking military trying to justify their budget.


Too bad there are backdoors in windows systems news.bbc.co.uk... tough luck i guess.

Both hackers, and internet security firms use the same software really.
Port scanners, packet sniffers etc. are tools used by hackers to attack their targets, and used by security, to watch for those very same intrusions.

If you beef up security, you are inevitably giving the hackers new tools to work with.

It's an endless cycle.

I find it hard to believe that the military is not already engaged in this activity and just looking for more money to ramp it up. We already have economic warfare and it is called capitalism I think.

The military is so intrinsically tied with corporations all ready, I suppose this should not be suprising* Nevertheless this gives me a very uneasy feeling* The military no doubt has the right to protect itself from virtual attack, but it should not act as hired mercenaries (if it comes to that in the future) let the corporations (and the banks) continue to use their own hired tech teams to protect themselves* We must keep the military out of the private sector as much as possible to at least give the illusion that we are a pure democracy

Okay so first the military starts doing what they want in the country...now our internet...sigh life is turning out #ty