Four of the five main online forums that al-Qaeda's media wing uses to distribute statements by Osama bin Laden and other extremists have been disabled since mid-September, monitors of the Web sites say. At the same time, in an apparently unrelated flare-up of online sectarian hostility, Shiite and Sunni hackers have targeted Web sites associated with the other sect, including that of a Saudi-owned television network and of Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric.

The author looks at the role government can play in protecting the Internet from cyberterrorists and state-sponsored information warfare.

DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has released a request for proposals to develop a National Cyber Range, part of a $30 billion, government-wide effort to prepare for online battle.

China is developing weapons that would disable its enemies' space technology such as satellites in a conflict, the Pentagon said in a report released last week.

The report also said "numerous" intrusions into computer networks around the world, including some owned by the U.S. government, in the past year seem to have originated in China.

If there were any doubts that the United States is preparing for war in space and cyberspace, testimony before the Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee last week would have wiped them away.

According to Gen. Kevin P. Chilton, head of U.S. Strategic Command, "our adversaries understand our dependence upon space-based capabilities, and we must be ready to detect, track, characterize, attribute, predict and respond to any threat to our space infrastructure."

Welcome to Cyberwar Country, USA

Wired, Feb. 11, 2008

The US Air Force has launched the Cyber Command, dedicated to the proposition that the next war will be fought in the electromagnetic spectrum, and that computers are military weapons.

Recent pronouncements by U.S. Air Force officials about their view of cyberspace as a war-fighting domain have attracted little attention. But the questions they raise for U.S. military policy and doctrine are profound.

A senior Chinese official has accused foreign intelligence agencies of causing "massive and shocking" damage to China by hacking into computers to ferret out political, military and scientific secrets.

Anyone who follows technology or military affairs has heard the predictions for more than a decade. Cyberwar is coming. Although the long-announced, long-awaited computer-based conflict has yet to occur, the forecast grows more ominous with every telling: an onslaught is brought by a warring nation, backed by its brains and computing resources; banks and other businesses in the enemy states are destroyed; governments grind to a halt; telephones disconnect; the microchip-controlled Tickle Me Elmos will be transformed into unstoppable killing machines.

Weeks after an organized cyberattack on the Baltic nation of Estonia, security experts in Silicon Valley and elsewhere are assessing its impact and asking the obvious question: Can it happen here?
The good news, they say, is that a similar attack would be less likely to succeed in the United States because of the immense size and breadth of the Internet networks here. But the same methods could be employed in new ways to wreak havoc here, and so experts say the private sector and the government have to work harder at shoring up Internet defenses.