It is expected that in 2014, the US will double its expenditures on cyber "weapons". In total, the US National Security Agency and the Pentagon are planning to spend more than $ 1.2 bln on means of cyber defense and cyber attacks.

In Russia, the idea of creating cyber "military forces" is rather new. It is expected that the basis for these forces will be created not earlier than by the end of 2014. Now, what can Russia range against the US in "virtual battles"?

The US military are justifying their plans to spend more on cyber programs by saying that cyber attacks are now becoming more and more frequent. The money will be spent, mainly, on increasing the personnel. At present, Pentagon has 830 experts in this sphere, but it is expected that their number will increase by 2,000 people each year.

In the US, cyber "troops" are occupied mainly by finding out and preventing the threats against the country's industrial and military data-processing networks that may come from foreign states. Besides, their task is to defend the state's social and communal infrastructure from hackers' attacks.

Of course, these activities are held under the slogan of defending the US national interests. However, they are not limited only by tasks of defense.

The Editor-in-Chief of the Russian magazine "Natsionalnaya Oborona" ("National Defense") Igor Korotchenko says:

"Today, the world's leading powers are viewing the cyber space as an area of a special kind of "wars". And there are no doubts about who is leading in these "wars" - of course, the USA. We know about these, for example, from Edward Snowden's revelations."

"By the way, the cyber "military forces" in the US are headed by the NSA's current director General Keith Alexander. This fact is evidence that today, cyber intelligence services are holding real "military" operations in the cyber space."

Thanks to Edward Snowden's revelations, some details of the activity of the US National Security Agency became widely known. It turned out that this special service does not only watch publications in the Internet, but also, surveys people's and organizations' online correspondence and bank accounts, bypassing protection systems, and eavesdrops phone talks of millions of people under the pretext of preventing terrorist acts."

The personality of Keith Alexander deserves some attention. When Alexander created his own operation center in 2005, he invented a Hollywood designer, who, by Alexander's request, decorated it as the captain's bridge from the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Many of General Alexander's favorite "brainchildren", including the PRISM surveillance system, were created by his colleague, scientist James Heath, whom some people called "a madman and an evil genius". Other people believed that the general and the scientist spent tax payers' money on some purposes known only to them. Later, Alexander parted company with Heath, but he still uses the programs that the scientist had created for him.

In Russia, the decision to form cyber "military forces" was taken by Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu in 2013. It is expected that the basis of these forces will be formed by the end of 2014. There are quite a few programmers in Russia whose skills can compete with those of James Heath. Sometimes, Russian cyber programs even surpass their American analogues.

The head of the Department of Information Wars of the Russian Laboratory of Research Development Igor Nezhdanov says:

"We realized that Russian programs are sometimes better than their American analogues when we were making a review of cyber programs that are used by American special services. They have made these programs to defend their own part of the Internet and to survey other countries' segments of the Web. It turned out that the algorithms of their programs are rather simple. We have already nearly repeated them. Most likely, in about half a year from now, we'll already be able to present our own programs to the government."

For obvious reasons, the details of this Russian project are not revealed. Meanwhile, while scientists are creating new cyber programs, Russian MPs are working out a Strategy of Russia's informational security. In particular, it has been suggested to attract so-called "white hackers" - that is, experts with some experience of discovering vulnerabilities in information systems, who have not been linked with criminal structures. Of course, they will work in cooperation with Russian special services.

It is expected that "cyber troops" will regularly check the safety of the websites of government structures.

After the draft of the Strategy of Russia's Information Security is ready, it will be sent to Russia's Security Council for viewing.

Source: Voice of Russia