Obama Increases Cyber War Budget-- And We Still Get Hacked

by Monica Davis

When most people think of terrorism and warfare, they think of the recent pressure cooker bomber attack on the Boston Marathon. But there is another war out there, an invisible war that crosses international boundaries.  This war is fought with computer code.

Its “army” is global, stretching from the rooms filled with Chinese military cyber warriors, to anti-corporate politically motivated hacktivists. Experts say that 80 percent of data intusion is financially motivated.  Twenty percent is Twenty-first century warfare.

In addition to including the largest number of sources to date, the report is also Verizon’s first to contain information on breaches resulting from state-affiliated cyberespionage attacks. This kind of attack targets intellectual property and accounted for 20% of the data breaches covered by the report.  READMOREHERE

The Obama administration is targeting China with a series of carrot and stick discussions about cyberwar.

John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, announced that Chinese and American diplomats would be meeting to have explicit discussions about cyberwar, but the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the political back-and-forth started behind closed doors in January of this year. However, China seems to be playing coy — at least publicly. Geng Shuang, spokesman for the Chinese Embassy, came out publicly against accusations of Chinese cyberattacks. He even went as far as to say that China is interested in cooperating with countries around the world to “safeguard peace and security of the cyberspace on the basis of mutual respect. MOREHERE

It takes money to fight a war—and to develop weapons systems for this specialized, technical, cyber war.  The Pentagon’s 2014  cyber war budget includes an $800,000,000  increase specifically for cyber war operations

In the 2014 defense budget released last week, the money allocated for cyber-operations rose to $4.7 billion, up from $3.9 billion. Much of that additional money is going into the development of offensive capabilities, usually referred to as computer network attacks, according to budget documents.MOREHERE