DoJ security chief in plea over hackers

The top national security official at the Department of Justice is urging the private sector to report more cyber attacks, as he fears that the US is facing a "pre-9/11 moment" in the race to defend against hackers.

John Carlin, assistant attorney-general for national security, called on the cyber security industry to help the government by reporting breaches when they happen, as he attended RSA in San Francisco, the largest cyber security conference in the world.

Despite the amount of money pouring into cyber defences, he said he felt "urgency every day". "Every day we are racing to try to catch up the systems, get the government architecture in place before we see a catastrophic type of attack on the cyber arena like we did on September 11th."

"This is an area unique in our remit in that so much of the critical infrastructure in this space is in private hands. We need to work with private industry to do what the core function of the nation state is: to protect citizens from terrorist attacks and attacks from nation states," he told the Financial Times.

He added that while the number of companies reporting intrusions had risen in the past two years, the government still had a problem with people choosing not to report them - or reporting them too late for law enforcement to take effective action.

Mr Carlin has been behind a push to try to hold hackers to account, no matter where they are in the world or how hard it is to discover who is behind an attack.

"We're going to follow the facts and the evidence where they lead and sometimes they lead to a hacker in the US and sometimes to a criminal overseas and sometimes to a state actor. When we can figure out who, using every tool in our arsenal, we will hold them to account," he said. "There is no free pass."

In the latest in a series of moves to try to combat cyber crime, President Barack Obama this month signed an executive order which will allow sanctions to be levied against suspected cyber criminals - for example, sanctions would prevent them or their associates from using the US banking system.

Mr Carlin said the US was using methods it had used in an equally difficult fight, against terrorists and proliferators of weapons of mass destruction.

"A group of investigators and lawyers are looking to what the threat is and using the legally available tools to . . . increase the cost [of attacks to hackers]," he said.

"There are some criminal groups who if you can identify them and cut off their access to US financial groups, it makes it a lot harder to do the bad acts."

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