US would lose cyberwar: former intel chief

The United States would lose a cyberwar if it fought one today, a former US intelligence chief has warned. Michael McConnell, a retired US Navy vice admiral who served as ex-president George W. Bush's director of national intelligence, also compared the danger of cyberwar to the nuclear threat posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. "If we went to war today in a cyberwar, we would lose," McConnell told a hearing Tuesday on cybersecurity held by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

"We're the most vulnerable, we're the most connected, we have the most to lose. We will not mitigate this risk," added McConnell, now an executive vice president for consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton's national security business. "And as a consequence of not mitigating this risk, we are going to have a catastrophic event." Tuesday's hearing came a little over a month after Internet giant Google revealed that it and other US companies had been the target of a series of sophisticated cyberattacks originating in China.

"National security and our economic security are at stake," said Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller, the panel's chairman and a co-sponsor of a bill seeking to bolster public and private sector cybersecurity cooperation. "A major cyberattack could shut down our nation's most critical infrastructure -- our power grid, telecommunications, financial services." James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that government intervention would probably be needed to crack down on the "Wild West" the Internet has become. The greatest threat to the United States comes from cyber espionage and cyber crime, he said, calling them a "major source of harm to national security."