Michael Chertoff: Cyber Terror Threat On Par With 9/11

April 10, 2008

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Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security Secretary, said that computer-based attacks had the ability to cripple financial institutions and government networks and that the threat posed by cyber-crime is “on a par” with the attacks of September 11, 2001.

“We take threats to the cyber world as seriously as we take threats to the material world,” Mr Chertoff told a gathering of security industry experts in San Francisco.

His remarks came as a report by the British Chambers of Commerce found that 23 per cent of UK businesses had suffered from an attack by malicious software in the past year - more than twice the number that had been the victim of credit card fraud.

Mr Chertoff said that the US Government planned to shift its approach to fighting computer-based crime from what he called “a fundamentally backward-looking architecture” - analyzing attacks as they happened and tracing back to their source - to “an early-warning system”.

He declined to elaborate on how officials would monitor and flag up threats before they materialized - saying the details were classified, but admitted that the new approach presented significant technical challenges.

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