Cyber attack threat worrisome, former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman tells PCI
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NEW ORLEANS—The former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff said Monday that the threat of cyber attacks keeps him awake at night.
The United States is “extremely vulnerable” to cyber weapons, Retired Marine Gen. Peter Pace said as he discussed global security decision-making and threat analysis at the Property Casualty Insurers Assn. of America’s annual meeting in New Orleans. He said the vulnerability is particularly pronounced for businesses.
He said the advent of cyber weapons will have the same impact on relationships between nations as nuclear weapons. Unlike nuclear weapons, however, thousands of cyber attacks occur each day, Gen. Pace said.
He said he knows exactly what the United States could do to launch a cyber attack and knows what the country cannot defend against. But nation states have generally practiced self-deterrence and do not want a cyber attack launched against them, he said.
Act of war
Gen. Pace asked his audience to think how, for example, a cyber attack that shuts down power to the East Coast would affect the insurance industry. He said a cyber attack in his opinion is an act of war.
But in a few years, small groups of individuals will have the power to launch the sort of actions that only nation states can do today, Gen. Pace predicted. “We collectively need to figure out how to deal with this,” he said.
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