Outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday afternoon that she believes cyber attacks and espionage on U.S. networks will constitute major threats to national security going forward. As Clinton told House lawmakers (rough transcript):
I predict will be a major threat to us and that’s cyber. Because it is not only going to be nation states where we’ve already seen cyberintrusions against our government and in the private sector, but increasingly nonstate actors will have more capacity to disrupt, to hack into, and put out false information, to accuse the United States of things that can, you know, light fires before we can put them out.
Clinton was responding to a question asked by Rep. Bill Keating (D-Mass). Clinton spent the morning and afternoon Wednesday testifying before the Senate and House respectively specifically focusing on questions lawmakers had about the security issues preceding the fatal attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012.
