What are the real capabilities of cyberwarfare? New report reveals shocking realities of cyber attacks!

U.S. cyberwarfare capabilities are major threat to N. Korea and other enemies

The hacking of Sony and the total Internet outage that hit North Korea has made the public focus, for the first time, on the Pentagon's multibillion-dollar cyber-warfare program.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Originally formed in 2010 at Fort Meade, Maryland, the U.S. Cyber Command controls a massive amount of technological marvels, bringing together the cyber-warfare capabilities of the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines in cyber attacks, intelligence gathering and defense.

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The command was established in order to safeguard the United States from major and minor cyber attacks. The damage a single computer virus could do in the United States is immense, and this damage even dwarfs even the destructive capabilities of conventional weapons-including a low yield nuclear weapon.

The ability of the U.S. to utilize cyberspace as a weapon is unparalleled in the rest of the world, and the very first commander of the Cyber-warfare command, Keith Alexander, then a general, revealed how the program quickly took on an offensive mindset.

"We have no alternative but to do so because every world event, crisis and trend now has a cyber-aspect to it, and decisions we make in cyberspace will routinely affect our physical or conventional activities and capabilities as well," he said during a Congressional hearing.

"Normalizing cyber requires improving our tactics, techniques and procedures, as well as our policies and organizations. It also means building cyber-capabilities into doctrine, plans and training-and building that system in such a way that our Combatant Commanders can think, plan and integrate cyber-capabilities as they would capabilities in the air, land and sea domains."

This is a very broad and nonspecific description of cyberwarfare and the U.S. capabilities for it, but there are a few hints at just what exactly the U.S. cyberwarfare program is capable of.

The Stuxnet computer worm that attacked Iran's nuclear computers, which caused significant damage to centrifuges and delayed the program, is thought to be a U.S. virus, though the government has not confirmed it.

Marine Lt. General Richard Mills also reported that in Afghanistan, cyberwarfare attacks were frequently used to disrupt and disable al-Qaeda and Taliban forces.

"I can tell you that as a commander in Afghanistan in the year 2010, I was able to use my cyberoperations against my adversary with great impact," he said.

"I was able to get inside his nets, infect his command and control, and in fact defend myself against his almost constant incursions to get inside my wire, to affect my operations."

While the attack that took down North Korea's internet access could very well have been a lone hacker or group of individuals, the U.S. government did not deny that they were involved.

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