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Rogers on Increased Threat of Militarized Cyber Attacks

Rogers: US needs to 'hit the weight room' before we can effectively deter cyber warfare

February 24, 2013

Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Mich.) said recent Chinese cyber economic espionage could give way to other nations using cyber attacks for military purposes Sunday on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos:"

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: One more question on this, we're talking mostly about economic espionage, how serious in the future is the threat that this would actually be a military - ?

MIKE ROGERS: Huge. Here's the scary part of this,it's already part of military planning for the Russians, for the Chinese and here's where it gets interesting, now, the Iranians. There's a company called Aramco in Saudi Arabia, a very sophisticated attack, it basically killed 30,000 machines, meaning you're not going to reboot that computer of yours, you've lost everything on it. It manipulated data, changed data and destroyed data. Very, very serious to the functioning of that company. Here in the United States, it's been ascribed to the iranians that they were probing our financial institutions - it's called a "denial of service attack," which is very low on the sophistication scale, Aramco very high on the sophistication scale, which means they're probing looking for vulnerabilities. They're already looking to disrupt. China would be a rational actor, wouldn't pay for them to use a military style disruption attack - same with the Russians - but you can't say that with the Iranians.

Full segment: