The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) recently discussed at a congressional hearing conducted this week just how its special anti-cyber crime taskforce worked when it came to combating cyber crime and the nefarious digital machinations of web rapscallions, hacker hooligans, cyber criminals, and virtual villains. The government bureau then outlined its latest accomplishments in the IT security front, which included the capture of million-dollar scammers via a synchronized raid on a thousand ATM machines a few months back.

However, truth be told, no one thinks that the U.S. is fully equipped and ready to stop a really bad hacker attack against its physical or financial networks. Granted, none of the American government's initiatives could be called mere "lip service" either, but the actual, hydra-headed problem of cyber security is just far too big a threat to be contained by the present security measures that the country had already implemented. Everyone was clear on that particular point.

The FBI told Congress that when it came to cyberspace-related innovations, terrorists like the Al Qaeda are woefully outmatched by the superior technology that the United States has; then again, the radical group still poses a significant threat to national cyber security nonetheless. Steven R. Chabinsky—one of several Cyber Division directors of the FBI—reminded the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee that these revolutionary zealots don't need to maintain a protracted and unrelenting cyber attack to succeed on some or all of their goals; just one successful breach is enough to render millions of dollars' worth of damage to the country's information grid.

Chabinsky went on to warn that a "compelling act of terror" in the worldwide web could happen with a simple exploit during a "short window of opportunity" to invade and then annihilate portions of America's humongous networks and system databases. The scary part of this scenario is the fact that there are many such windows of vulnerability present at any given time that any hacker or cyber terrorist worth his salt could take advantage of.

More to the point, the fact that the U.S. inevitably continues to implement new, untested technologies without any adequate security measures accompanying them into their businesses and organizations has left a seeming Swiss-cheese-like security situation that online outlaws from, say, China or Russia are all too eager to abuse.