National Defense > Blog > Posts > U.S. Could Face Legions of Organized Foreign Hackers

3/24/2010

U.S. Could Face Legions of Organized Foreign Hackers
When it comes to defeating cyberthreats, the U.S. government is seriously undermanned, said an expert on computer security.

There are currently 44,000 Turkish teenagers organized in a rigorous military style community of hackers who are learning their tradecraft from each other, said Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics at the University of Alabama-Birmingham.

In this virtual community, those who accomplish more achieve a higher rank. There are teachers and mentors, just like any other organization, he said at the Gov Sec conference in Washington, D.C.

There are similar communities in Saudi Arabia with 100,000 members. Iraq has 40,000 members. China has more than 400,000 members "where you mentor each other in ways to attack the enemies of the state," he said.

"We don't have anything close to that in the United States. Any one of those communities has more trained cyberwarriors than our entire U.S. military," Warner said.

As far as creating a domestic force to counter these legions of hackers — fighting fire with fire — there is a stigma to doing such work in the United States. It's not a socially acceptable profession, but it is in many of these nations, he said.

U.S. students could be trained to do offensive cyberoperations, but there is a chance they could use their skills for nefarious activities, he said.
Posted at 2:33 PM by Stew Magnuson | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

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