cybersecurity

Patriotic geeks might want to brush off those resumes, because the long-awaited U.S. Cyber Command officially went live last Thursday, and hopes to recruit at least 1,000 cyber security experts over the next few years. But the newly formed group faces questions about its mission and responsibilities, as well as competition for recruits from U.S. intelligence agencies.

The announcement by the Department of Homeland Security also coincided with the kickoff of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, which infuses the usual trick-or-treat spirit of October with additional meaning.

Sure, most Americans spent last weekend grilling meat, drinking beer and blowing thing up. But the pasty, lonely few that spent Forth of July weekend browsing the websites of the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Transportation noticed something terribly amiss. Those websites, along with 12 other US government websites along with numerous South Korean government sites were loading very, very slowly, and sometimes, not at all. The culprit? A massive distributed denial-of-service attack.

After a year of alarm and hype, cybersecurity has finally made it to the top of the Obama administration's to-do list. President Obama, introducing a new report on U.S. cybersecurity in a speech on Friday, said cybersecurity represents "one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation."

After frightening revelations that hackers have already managed to break into the computer systems that control huge swaths of the United States' power grid and other pieces of national infrastructure, the Wall Street Journal reports that cyber-spies have broken into the Pentagon's Joint Strike Fighter program -- its costliest initiative -- and made off with several terabytes of sensitive data.