14 DAY TRIAL // Janet Napolitano, Secretary of DHS, revealed that in the past period hackers attacked components of the US infrastructure, including transportation and financial systems, in many cases coming very close to succeeding.
It seems as the Department of Homeland Security wasn't taking wild guesses when it raised concerns about possible attacks launched by Anonymous against industrial systems. Even though it's not clear who exactly were the cybercriminals involved, it turns out that there have been numerous attempts.
According to Politico, the secretary claimed there is a need to create a national and international framework that would address these situations.
“It could theoretically cause a loss of life, but also a huge economic loss. We’ve seen attempts on Wall Street, transportation systems, things of those sorts,” Napolitano said at a conference.
“One of the problems we have is that the current international regime, international law, international rules of conflict … really have not been developed with cyber.”
US lawmakers have been working on legislation that would clarify the DHS's responsibility in protecting critical infrastructure for more than a year now, but many fear that the end of this year will still not bring any final results.
Even though cyberattacks are not currently the greatest concern of the US government when it comes to outside threats, sooner than expected, enemies of the state might attempt such an approach.
Meanwhile, the department will continue to address these issues as best they can, mainly following the guidelines from the Cybersecurity Policy Review President Obama released in 2009.
The lack of clear policies and regulations might soon take its toll on the country's infrastructure, but hopefully DHS will manage to handle the situations as it has so far.
Physical operations such as the ones from 9/11 can cause a lot of panic among citizens, but on the other hand, so would an outage of a critical component.