What's the biggest danger to America? It's not nukes and it isn't terrorism

The head of the National Security Agency revealed to a Congressional panel that China and "probably one or two other" countries have the ability to shut down the nation's power grid and other critical infrastructures through cyberwarfare.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Admiral Michael Rogers, who is also the head of the U.S. Cyber Command, said that U.S. intelligence has detected malware from China and elsewhere on computer systems within the U.S. that affect the daily lives of every American.

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"It enables you to shut down very segmented, very tailored parts of our infrastructure that forestall the ability to provide that service to us as citizens," Rogers said during his review with the House Intelligence Committee.

Rogers sees these attacks as part of "coming trends" in which hostile nations and other actors exploit vulnerabilities in U.S. cyber systems.

Cyber-security firm Mandiant has found that hackers who work on behalf of the Chinese government were able to access public utility systems in the U.S., including power generators and water and fuel transportation systems.

"We see them attempting to steal information on how our systems are configured, the very schematics of most of our control systems, down to engineering level of detail so they can look at where are the vulnerabilities, how are they constructed, how could I get in and defeat them," said Rogers.

"We're seeing multiple nation-states invest in those kind of capabilities."

While Rogers would not identify the other countries with this cyberwarfare capability, Russia is generally believed to be among them.

This testimony comes just after the Pew Internet and American Life Project released a report that predicts that by 2025 there will be a catastrophic cyber-attack that would cause massive loss of life and financial damage.

"It is only a matter of the when, not the if, that we are going to see something traumatic," Rogers said.

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