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A crystal-clear denouement of U.S readiness to combat threats in cyberspace came at a hearing held March 10 by the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security.

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Adversaries, which include unfriendly governments and militaries, intelligence agencies, organized criminals groups and hactivists, have by most accounts already penetrated U.S government and private networks or are actively engaged in doing so.

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Most of the efforts appear to be focused on leeching away secrets from public and private IT sectors for profit and for espionage.

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The threat that has not going unnoticed. Earlier this month, Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) introduced new legislation that would give the federal government sweeping new authority on the cybersecurity front.

Federal efforts to secure cyberinfrastructure are bogged down by a lack of vision, planning and leadership.

The legislation would give the government a more direct role in developing and enforcing baseline standards, not just for agencies but also on companies in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, utilities and health care. It would empower the president to declare a cyberemergency if needed and allow him to disconnect federal or private-sector networks in the interests of national security.

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"Our digital infrastructure has become the most important underpinning of U.S. national and economic security," says Amit Yoran, former director of the National Cybersecurity Division at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

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A National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) that was set up within the DHS in January 2008 with the specific task of coordinating information security across the federal government has so far failed to get off the ground. In March, its first director, Rod Beckstrom quit the post after just a year on the job, citing a lack of support from within the DHS and turf wars with the National Security Agency (NSA).

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The NSA, which is in charge of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI), has been jostling for broader control of the federal information security agenda.

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Rather, the role of setting, overseeing and coordinating a national information security agenda needs to rest directly with the White House, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and others. The DHS and other federal agencies would then work with a new specially created White House Office of Cyberspace to roll out and manage security policy.

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The CSIS, a Washington-based bipartisan think tank that in December submitted a set of security recommendations to President Obama, argues that such a strategy would require the government to declare its cyberinfrastructure a vital asset for national and economic security. It would then need to indicate its willingness to use all of the tools at its disposal -- diplomatic, economic, military and intelligence -- to protect that asset.

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You mean, like the one that we already have? The one created by the White House in 2003, but which is now gone from the White House website? Luckily, it is still available through the Internet Archive at http://web.archive.org/web/20080307022926/http://www.whitehouse.gov/pcipb/cyberspace_strategy.pdf. If it's still the official policy of the United States Goverment, shouldn't it still be available on the White House website?

James Lewis, director of the technology and public policy program at the CSIS.

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Paul Kurtz, former special assistant to the president and senior director for critical infrastructure protection on the White House's Homeland Security Council.

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Kurtz, who is currently a partner at Good Harbor Consulting LLC.

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The "digital Pearl Harbor" in which large swathes of the Internet would be taken down by adversaries to create widespread disruption is a possibility that needs to be prepared for, security analysts say. But far more likely and worrying are more focused attacks against critical infrastructure targets such as power, financial services and water services.

The cascading blackout in the Northeast in 2003 remains a potent example of the havoc a computer failure can cause -- even if, as in that case, the incident was caused by negligence rather than malice.

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Another reminder is an experiment conducted in March 2007 in which the Idaho National Laboratory showed how it could reduce a power turbine to a smoking, shuddering, metal-spewing mess simply by executing malicious code on the computer controlling the system.

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This was demonstrated in 2000 when a disgruntled employee at an Australian water-treatment plant released about 264,000 gallons of raw sewage into nearby rivers and parks by breaking into the control systems using a radio transmitter, he says.

Similarly, in August 2003, a computer virus called Sobig managed to infiltrate a control system at CSX Corp.'s headquarters in Florida and shut down train signaling systems throughout the East Coast for hours, he says.

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And in October 2006, a foreign hacker broke into a system at a water-filtration plant in Harrisburg, Pa., after an employee's laptop computer was compromised via the Internet and then used as an entry point to install malware on the plant's computer system.

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Patti Titus, the previous chief information security officer at the Transportation Security Administration, is among a growing number of executives arguing for the development of deterrent capabilities in cyberspace. "What we need to say is, 'We are the U.S., and if you mess with us, you'd better be careful,'" says Titus, who is currently chief information security officer at Unisys Corp.

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But figuring out the nuances of such a strategy can be tricky, and care needs to be taken, says Kurtz. "There is some real work that needs to be done" on a global basis to think through issues, he says. "What is an act of war in cyberspace? We need to have a far more substantial dialog here in the United States and abroad about what this means," he says, especially because the means to do harm in cyberspace are not restricted just to governments and militaries.

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Of course, the underlying assumption here is that it is possible for there to be acts of war in cyberspace. The question then becomes which acts are acts of war.

Shawn Carpenter, a former network security analyst at Sandia National Laboratories.

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But make no mistake, he says, the enemy is already here, lurking in sensitive systems and networks, in control of large botnets, inside financial systems and the power grid, and it needs to be stopped.

"My definition of a digital Pearl Harbor is where these people are already here. They already have access and are just sort of hanging out maintaining their access for the time when they get some instruction to bring down the system or corrupt information," he says.

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