Washington Insider with Ronald Kessler
Sen. Bond: Cyberattack More Devastating Than Nuclear Bomb
Wednesday, July 15, 2009 9:09 AM
By: Ronald Kessler
A cyberattack on the United States could be more devastating economically than
a nuclear bomb and could cause massive deaths as well, Sen. Kit Bond, vice
chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, tells Newsmax.
“You can cause more economic harm with a cyberattack than a nuclear one,” Bond
says. “It could crush our country and the world economy, which depends upon the
United States as the world’s leading economy. If they take us down, they
cripple everybody.”
Bond says well-publicized cyberattacks this month underscore the seriousness of
the problem, which his committee has been studying. The recent attacks spread
viruses to U.S. and South Korean personal computers, slowing them down and
turning them into zombies connected to unknown sites.
The Missouri Republican says the recent attacks demonstrate how a cyberattack
“could take down our entire infrastructure, which depends upon the use of
computers and information technology.”
Bond notes that while the 3,000 deaths caused by the 9/11 attacks were tragic,
“the relatively minor disruption of our economy caused billions of dollars of
losses. Regrettably, the fictional movie ‘Live Free or Die Hard’ lays out the
nightmare scenario. And if Hollywood can figure it out, you know darn well that
if the terrorists didn’t know it then, they know it now.”
With such an attack, “you could potentially disrupt air traffic control and
cause deaths, you could perhaps even open floodgates on hydro-dams that would
put lives at risk,” Bond says. “If you took down a major Wall Street
institution, you could cause a major disruption in the economy, amounting to
trillions of dollars. We’ve seen how the financial mess has crashed our
financial system. This would be far more devastating and happen more quickly.”
A cyberattack could also disrupt the food supply, electrical power, heat, and
air conditioning.
Whether the recent attacks originated in North Korea, as some believe, is not
known. That’s one of the problems when dealing with a cyberattack: Its origin
is often impossible to trace.
“There are very significant, large governments which probably have the capacity
to do great damage,” Bond notes. “In addition, we have terrorists who are very
knowledgeable on computers, and if they developed some of these skills, they
could perform attacks. We wouldn’t know where they came from.”
Bond adds, “If we can’t prevent the attack, picking up the pieces is going to
be a very difficult thing. If you can’t track, if you don’t know who it is,
it’s very difficult to retaliate against a sophisticated hacker who uses a
series of cutouts to spread a virus.”
Bond opposes President Barack Obama’s plan to appoint a cyber czar to oversee
the U.S. response.
“I’m not willing to live under a Russian-style czarist system,” Bond says.
“He’s talking about a czar for everything. We’ve got a system that works. Now
I’m not in favor necessarily of forming a new bureaucracy. But that
responsibility ought to be in the hands of either a new agency or an existing
agency, where the Senate has confirmation authority and the head of it reports
to Congress to tell us what they’re doing.”
Whether located in the Defense Department or Homeland Security, the agency
would be responsible for providing assistance to the private sector and could
work with the intelligence community, the military, and the rest of the
government to make sure that “we have the capacity to pre-empt strikes where we
see a potential threat arising, before it destroys our system,” Bond says.
Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com. View his
previous reports and get his dispatches sent to you free via e-mail. Go here
now.
© 2009 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
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