After the Cold War came Al Qaeda and then…..the Cyber Wars!!! By Stuxnet

We’ve seen over the last 5 years countries cyber-attacked (e.g. Iran’s nuclear program by the Stuxnet worm), Sony brought to its knees and now two prominent information security firms hacked – L-3 and RSA (EMC).
The Pentagon has adopted a new strategy that will classify major cyber-attacks as acts of war, paving the way for possible military retaliation, the Wall Street Journal reported on May 31.

The newspaper said the Pentagon plans to unveil its first-ever strategy regarding cyber warfare next month, in part as a warning to foes that may try to sabotage the country's electricity grid, airports, refineries, ports, subways, pipelines or Netflix.

"If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks," it quoted a military official as saying.

• Oh General, the very nature of a cyber-attack is it comes from the ether and may not be the action of a nation. Scenario 1, a special ops team from oh say North Korea gets dropped into say Belize and launches the attack. Poof no more Belize but Belize was never the issue.

• Scenario 2, replace North Korean special ops team with my next door neighbor’s high school age kid!

CIA Chief Leon Panetta set a particularly decisive tone – and he did so before potential critics had a chance to set a different one – by characterizing a potential cyber-attack as the next Pearl Harbor, a sneak attack crippling power, security, financial, and governmental systems.

NGOs or leftists are rightfully obsessing over the Orwellian possibilities.

As always there is money to be made and Defense contractors that don’t get out ahead in this game will find themselves woefully behind the competition.

Three years ago, for example, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon were investing resources and acquiring new units to gain first-mover advantage in the cyber-war market that observers estimated would reach $11 billion by 2013.

Pentagon spokespersons now talk in earnest about “botnets” (carpet bombing in cyberspace) that can crash adversarial computers worldwide. The Pentagon is developing an approved list of cyber-weapons to streamline its arsenal and provide a structure for adding on future capabilities.

Wow!!! Will future arms talks center not around nuclear arms reductions but reduction of the cyber arsenals…think about it.

National security lifts private as well as public sector entities. Maybe this is the focus that can lift our economy out of its doldrums.

Some companies to think about: LLL, EMC, HON, LMT, NOC, RTN