Dmitri Alperovitch Quotes

Besides the conventional military threats, North Korean cyber capabilities are growing.

An element of virtually every national security threat and crime problem the FBI faces is cyber-based or facilitated. We face sophisticated cyber threats from state-sponsored hackers, hackers for hire, organized cyber syndicates, and terrorists.

Because there are little to no consequences for conducting cyberattacks, criminals and nation-states are becoming bolder in their threats and behavior. Russia, China, North Korea and Iran are increasingly hacking into U.S. companies and government networks for espionage purposes or financial gain.

This is technology that will not go away. And to risk it moving into the hands of a terrorist group like al Qaeda or to other focused enemies of the United States, would have tragic consequences.

The United States cannot wait for the cyber equivalent of the collapse of the World Trade Center.

I do agree that when it comes to cyber warfare, we have more to lose than any other nation on earth.

A major attack on our cyber systems could shut down our critical infrastructure - financial systems, communications systems, electric grids, power plants, water treatment centers, transportation systems and refineries - that allows us to run our economy and protect the safety of Americans.

Today, we face another major potential attack on our country. This attack is not a hijacked plane or bomb, although that remains a threat; rather, it is a cyber attack.

The problem with cyber weapons for a country like ours is the ability to control them.

In 2018, my biggest worry is actually about North Korea. I worry a great deal that they may do a destructive attack, perhaps against our financial sector, in an attempt to deter a potential U.S. strike against either their nuclear facilities or even the regime itself.

My view is that the cyber threat is bigger than any one government agency - or even the government itself. But the FBI brings a rare combination of scope and scale, experience, and tools to the mix. We investigate criminal activity like intrusions and cyber attacks, but we also investigate national security threats like foreign influence.

Some of the greatest national security threats we face cannot be defeated or defended by traditional military hardware, but only by greatly enhanced cyberspace warfare, including both offensive cyber-warfare and cyber-security.

The United States lost a bit of the moral high ground when it comes to warning the world of the danger of cyberattacks.

When you use any kind of internet-based capability, any kind of electronic capability, to cause damage to a private entity or a foreign nation or a foreign actor, these are potential acts of war.

If nothing else, the cyber attacks that occurred during the 2016 presidential election have laid bare the very real vulnerabilities that exist across our government and the private sector. Imagine the harm that could be done if our enemies ever hack into the Department of Defense or Homeland Security.

The Internet - central to modern life - provides new ways for our enemies to plan and act against us.

Digital warfare, in the Clausewitz definition as 'the continuation of policy by other means,' reached Western public consciousness via my own country, Estonia, in 2007 when our governmental, banking, and news media servers were hit with 'distributed denial-of-service attacks,' which is when hackers overload servers until they shut down.

Everybody has a hacking capability. And probably every intelligence service is hacking in the territory of other countries. But who exactly does what? That would be a very sensitive piece of information. But it's very difficult to communicate about it. Because nobody wants to admit the scope of what they're doing.

It seems Russians hacked into emails from both the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee and then chose to release only the DNC emails. These attacks destabilize and undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral process, and they must be addressed in a serious and proportional way - just as we would for a non-cyberattack.

Cyberespionage and cyberattack is exploding from our adversaries inside our country. We don't seem capable of stopping it.

In a modern digitalized world, it is possible to paralyze a country without attacking its defense forces: The country can be ruined by simply bringing its SCADA systems to a halt. To impoverish a country, one can erase its banking records. The most sophisticated military technology can be rendered irrelevant. In cyberspace, no country is an island.

What we've seen over the last decade is we've seen a departure from the traditional work of the National Security Agency. They've become sort of the national hacking agency, the national surveillance agency. And they've lost sight of the fact that everything they do is supposed to make us more secure as a nation and a society.

The public interest is not always the same as the national interest. Going to war with people who are not our enemy in places that are not a threat doesn't make us safe, and that applies whether it's in Iraq or on the Internet. The Internet is not the enemy. Our economy is not the enemy.

Given our law enforcement authorities, our central role in the Intelligence Community, and the span of our responsibilities - from counterterrorism to counterintelligence to criminal investigations - we're particularly well-positioned to address cyber threats to our national security.

It is interesting that cyberwarfare is developing into something conventional and attacking objects, infrastructure, and critical services.