In New York on Sunday, lawmakers urged President Obama to expand the U.S. State Department’s foreign policy mechanisms to address crime and security on the Internet. The recent attacks on companies that severed ties to WikiLeaks were cited as one of the main reasons these changes were needed.
Standing at Symantec's New York City office, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Representative Yvette D. Clarke urged the President to adopt proposals that protect New York businesses and infrastructure. These proposals would put foreign countries that fail to enforce cyber security laws on notice, and even apply sanctioning to those that do not cooperate.
For the past week, the lawmakers explained during a press event, MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, and other American companies were sabotaged by a string of coordinated attacks. The reason for said attacks is due to the fact that each company cut ties to WikiLeaks. They said the global cyber assault was "intended to flood the companies' websites with traffic," thereby blocking all access and leaving them unavailable to customers.
In addition to these attacks, State Department documents disclosed by WikiLeaks earlier this month demonstrate that government-sponsored cyber warfare is a very real and serious threat, the lawmakers added.
“The cyberattacks we’ve seen in the last week show that America and the world is vulnerable to a full scale cyber war,” warned Senator Gillibrand.
“America must be able to defend against these types of attacks and shut down cyber threats around the world. This must be a top priority for our national security and our economy. We must go after cyber criminals wherever they are – and it must be an international effort.”
Senator Gillibrand joined with Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) to author the International Cybercrime Reporting and Cooperation Act. This bill will hold foreign countries accountable for cybercrime committed on their soil...

"Cyberanarchists" are attacking the websites of multinational companies that cut off services to WikiLeaks after it published classified State Department cables.

But these cyberattacks in the name of Internet freedom are mere pinpricks in comparison with the havoc a real cyberwar could wreak. Yet Americans have developed no credible defenses, according to former White House counterterrorism czar Richard A. Clarke, author of a chilling book called Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It.

"The United States is currently far more vulnerable to cyberwar than Russia or China," said Clarke, speaking to Philadelphia's Foreign Policy Research Institute last week. "We may even be at risk some day from nonstate actors . . . who can hire teams of highly capable hackers."

Our risk is high because we are more dependent on computer networks than any other nation. "All our critical infrastructure depends on computer networks working," Clarke said, including trains, planes, truck dispatchers, the electricity grid, hospitals, pipelines, supply chains, banks, and the stock exchange.
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The most dramatic trial run was the recent highly sophisticated attack by a computer worm known as Stuxnet on Iranian centrifuges used to enrich uranium. The "good news," Clarke said, is that whoever managed to do this - and some think it was Israel - set Iran's nuclear program back for months "by a precision-guided cyberattack," without having to send bombers. The bad news: "This could happen to us."

This is why, Clarke said, "it's time we get over our partisanship and tell Congress to defend our cyberspace." We need a comprehensive strategy to defend critical civilian infrastructure, including electricity grids and major Internet service providers that are privately owned. A balance must be found between privacy protection and requiring the installation of scanning systems that detect malware.