Next Threat; Data Manipulation

[xoxoxoBruce]

We've long heard about the danger to the US power grid, so many times I've wondered why don't they fix it if they know the danger exists?(answer, money) We also heard how Iran's centrifuges were sabotaged. But mostly, what we've heard about so far, is stolen data apparently for profit, and rumors of military secrets being pilfered. Next up, not stealing data, but changing it, like student grades in the school data base has been done.

US intelligence chiefs are warning Congress that the next phase of escalating online data theft is likely to involve the manipulation of digital information.

A “cyber armageddon”, long imagined in Washington as a catastrophic event of digitally triggered damage to physical infrastructure, is less likely than “cyber operations that will change or manipulate data”, the US director of national intelligence, James Clapper, told the House intelligence committee on Wednesday. Clapper, backed by the director of the National Security Agency, Admiral Michael Rogers, said that while such efforts had yet to manifest themselves, US business and governmental agencies had entered an era of persistent “low-to-moderate level cyber-attacks from a variety of sources”.

Yet both indicated that US digital networks are currently threatened by wide-scale data theft, like the recent intrusion into the networks of the Office of Personnel Management, not destruction or compromise. Rogers and Clapper warned that a mutated phase of malicious digital penetrations would undermine confidence in data stored and accessible on US networks, creating an uncertainty that could jeopardize US military situational awareness.

“I believe the next push on the envelope is going to be the manipulation or the deletion of data which would of course compromise its integrity,” Clapper told the House panel. Rogers testified that while the NSA and its military conjoined twin, US Cyber Command, had clear rules for protecting US networks, its authorities to engage in offensive action online were murkier.

link