Intel officials say U.S. ‘severely threatened’ by daily cyber attacks

Hackers are stealing sensitive information from government and private networks in the U.S. on a daily basis, the director of national intelligence said Tuesday.

“Sensitive information is stolen daily from both government and private sector networks, undermining confidence in our information systems, and in the very information these systems were intended to convey,” said Dennis Blair, the director of National Intelligence.

Blair made the revealing remark at the Senate Intelligence Committee’s annual threat assessment hearing on Tuesday.

He said the U.S. government’s cyber infrastructure is “severely threatened” by hackers, who are attempting to steal sensitive data from the government daily.

The warning to lawmakers comes just weeks after a cyber attack involving Google’s operations in China. Google has threatened to pull out of the country over the incident, in which hackers, possibly working with the Chinese government’s consent, tried to breech the e-mail accounts of human rights activists in China.

Blair said that the attacks on Google were a “wake-up call to those who have not taken this problem seriously.”

“Malicious cyber activity is occurring on an unprecedented scale with extraordinary sophistication,” Blair said.

Blair described the U.S. situation as one in which the government’s ability to defend against hackers is outmatched by hackers’ abilities to infiltrate, steal, and do damage to U.S. computers.