Working 24/7

U.S. Cyber Command has been “in action every day of its brief existence,” Gen. Keith Alexander told the House Armed Services Committee in testimony Wednesday.

DOD networks defended by CYBERCOM are probed “roughly 250,000 times an hour,” and threats to those networks could take on an increasingly destructive nature in the future, Alexander said in his first public testimony since being named head of the command in May. Alexander is also the director of the National Security Agency.

“The key thing that we've seen is hacker activity and exploitation. . . . Not just stealing our intellectual property but also our secrets and other parts of our networks,” Alexander said. “Those are things that can destroy equipment. So it's not something that you recover from by just stopping the traffic.”

Alexander also stressed the importance of partnerships with industry, the White House and the Department of Homeland Security in carrying out CYBERCOM's mission, although he stressed that it is not CYBERCOM's mission “to defend the entire nation, just the DOD networks.”

Asked by Rep. Jim Langevin (D-RI) how the U.S. government could work to stop an attack against critical infrastructure, the banking sector or the transportation system, Alexander said the task would largely fall to industry.

“We need to come up with a more -- my term -- a more dynamic or active defense that puts into place those capabilities that we need to defend in a crisis,” he said. “That's what we are working on right now in the department to do to ensure that that works and working, actually, closely, with Department of Homeland Security and the White House to show how that could be done.”