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Although the U.S. Navy has been in the cyber arena for many years, today the service officially moved into the operational cyber domain as Vice Adm. Barry McCullough, USN, took command of the U.S. Fleet Cyber Command/U.S. 10th Fleet.

Gen. Keith Alexander, USA, director of the National Security Agency and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, is calling for greater international cooperation on cyber defense. “We don’t have a U.S. network, a Canadian network, a Mexican network. It’s all one network. We all operate that, and we have to have international partners to protect it,” Gen. Alexander emphasized.

Estonia is the first nation in history to have experienced massive cyber attacks directed at its government and key infrastructure. The event, which took place over a three-week period in April and May 2007, marked the beginning of a new type of amorphous, hard-to-track threat to international security. Coming in successive waves, the attacks almost shut down the Baltic country’s government, which relies extensively upon online transactions and e-commerce. In the aftermath of the incident, the European Union and NATO launched a series of initiatives to strengthen national infrastructures and to improve communications between national and multinational organizations in the event of another cyber attack.