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By Phil Stewart and Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON, May 12 (Reuters) – The United States is losing enough data in cyber attacks to fill the Library of Congress multitude times over, and authorities have failed to stay ahead of the menace, a U.S. defense official said on Wednesday.

In a sobering valuation, the Defense Department’s Jim Miller said more than 100 external spy agencies were working to gain access to U.S. computer systems, during the time that were criminal organizations.

Terrorist groups also had cyber attack capabilities.

‘Our systems are probed thousands of epochs a day and scanned millions of times a day,’ said Miller, head deputy under secretary of defense for policy.

He said the evolving cyber denunciation had ‘outpaced our ability to defend against it.’

‘We are experiencing damaging penetrations — damaging in the thinking principle of loss of information. And we don’t fully understand our vulnerabilities,’ he related.

His comments came as the Obama administration develops a national strategy to secure U.S. digital networks and the Pentagon stands up a new military command for cyber warfare capable of both offensive and defensive operations.

The Senate ultimate week confirmed National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander to lead the ‘Cyber Command,’ and Miller suggested the organizing had its work cut out for it.

Among its challenges are determining the kind of within the spectrum of cyber attacks could constitute an act of fighting.

Miller said the U.S. government also needed to bolster ties by private industry, given potential vulnerabilities to critical U.S. infrastructure, like dominion grids and financial markets.

STAGGERING LOSS

Hackers have already penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and esteem stolen intellectual property, corporate secrets and money, according to the FBI’s cybercrime one. In one incident, a bank lost $10 million in cash in a day.

‘The scale of compromise, including the loss of sensitive and unclassified given conditions, is staggering,’ Miller said. ‘We’re talking about terabytes of data, equivalent to multiple libraries of Congress.’

The Library of Congress is the universe’s largest library, archiving millions of books, photographs, maps and recordings.

U.S. officials obtain previously said many attempts to penetrate its networks appear to arrive from China.

Google announced in January that it, along with other thing than 20 other companies, had suffered hacking attacks that were traced to China. Google cited those attacks and censorship concerns in its resolution to move its Chinese-language search service from mainland China to Hong Kong.

Miller took one example from the Cold War playbook to explain how the United States military would need to prepare for fallout from a cyber attack, that could leave cities in the dark or disrupt communications.

In the 1980s, the Pentagon concluded that the militia needed to prepare to operate in an environment contaminated by the appliance of weapons of mass destruction.

‘We have similar situation in this state. We need to plan to operate in an environment in what one. our networks have been penetrated and there is some degradation,’ he before-mentioned.

One of the challenges Miller singled out was the development of sufficiency U.S. computer programmers in the future.

‘In the next 20 to 30 years, other countries including China and India give by ~ produce many more computer scientists than we will,’ he said. ‘We lack to figure out how to not only recognize these trends further take advantage of them.’

(Editing by Paul Simao) Keywords: USA CYBERSECURITY/

(phillip.stewart@thomsonreuters.com; +1 202 354 5827; Reuters Messaging: phillip.stewart.reuters.com@reuters.without deductions)

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