Defense cyber chief: The cloud is the military's next Internet

Military networks and software must be tied to the cloud to defend Defense Department computers against adversaries, the Pentagon's cyber chief said.

Currently, Defense data reside on three main systems that cannot be centrally secured, creating disparate levels of protection that serve as entryways for ever evolving malicious software, according to military officials. The top brass envision fixing this setup with a cloud -- a common network infrastructure capable of spotting and blocking threats remotely for all the military's databases, PCs and other electronics. Gen. Keith Alexander, chief of U.S. Cyber Command, called the cloud approach "active defense," adding that "hunting on our networks has got to change." He was speaking to computer security officials from the public and private sectors at a conference organized by the Security Innovation Network. "We have to find a way to communicate dynamically and pass those signatures around," Alexander said, referring to the digital fingerprints of malware that are loaded into antivirus software to detect threats. So far intruders have caused more economic than physical pain -- but that may change soon, he said.