[HIB]Assessing threat of online theft vs. cyber war

[newsbot]

There's a lot of talk about the threat of cyber war these days -- the Pentagon has even stood up a new Cyber Command to unite defensive and offensive cyber capabilities -- but the more serious threat to the country may be the theft of intellectual property from computer networks, says the Pentagon's second in command. It's less dramatic than the prospect of a hacker bringing down the power grid or sabotaging a nuclear power plant, but, "it may be the most significant cyberthreat that the United States will face over the long term," says Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III in a forthcoming article on the "Pentagon's Cyberstrategy" he wrote for Foreign Affairs. Framing the policy debate in these terms could help focus efforts where they would bear most fruit, and help policymakers prioritize how they spend cyber dollars. "Every year, an amount of intellectual property many times larger than all the intellectual property contained in the Library of Congress is stolen from networks maintained by U.S. businesses, universities, and government agencies," Lynn wrote in the upcoming September/October issue.

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