Wild, wild west: in the fight against cybercrime, weapons have short shelf lives.

• Author: Jean, Grace V.
• Position: Cybersecurity

If you purchased a brand new computer today with all the latest security software and plug it into the Internet, how long would it be before the first hacker probed it?

About four hours.

Even the latest innovations to protect networks are not enough to counter cybercrimes.

"Unfortunately, it's still a bit of a wild West," says Tim McKnight, vice president and information security officer for Northrop Grumman Information Systems.

"You're having to fight hackers with very little governance and law," he adds. Cybercriminals have the upper hand because the cost of planning and executing a cyberattack is cheap and it's difficult to identify the attackers.

U.S. networks are the targets of choice.

"We're the most vulnerable nation on the Earth because we're the most dependent," John "Mike" McConnell, former director of national intelligence and a senior vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton, says at a conference organized by the Security Innovation Network.

President Obama in a May speech pinned America's economic prosperity to the security of its digital infrastructure. "It's now clear this cyberthreat is one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation. It's also dear that we're not as prepared as we should be," he warned.

On July 4, about 170,000 computers in 74 countries were linked, unbeknownst to their owners, in a botnet--a collection of malicious software robots that run autonomously. The botnet was commanded by unidentified assailants who attacked government websites in South Korea and the United States. Nearly all U.S. federal agencies, including the White House, were hit by the denial-of-service attack.

"I think we're really at a crisis point where we have no confidence in the security of our information," Amit Yoran, former director of the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, (US-CERT), and Department of Homeland Security's national cybersecurity division, tells National Defense.

Homeland security officials worry most about a "digital Pearl Harbor" attack on the nation's cyber-infrastructure. The July 4 attack could be a harbinger of things to come, they say.

"I believe we are being set up. We are being probed constantly," says Robert Rodriguez, chairman and founder of the Security Innovation Network. "The adversaries are innovating faster than we are because they don't have corporate governance and budget and privacy issues. They move at warp speed."

Many of the technologies that have...