CNN news 2011-11-06 加文本

cnn news 2011-11-06

AZUZ: That is what each of the people running for president wants to be. On the Democratic side, you have President Obama, expected to get his party`s nomination.

AZUZ (voice-over): On the Republican side, there are more than a half dozen people out on the campaign trail. Right now, they`re working to stand out in that crowd, so they travel from state to state, they meet voters and they participate in debates. cnn is hosting two of those this month.

AZUZ: When the calendar turns to 2012, that`s when those primaries and caucuses start happening. Voters will cast their ballots for individuals and you`ll see this field of candidates get smaller until one of them eventually becomes the official nominee at the national conversation in late August.

AZUZ (voice-over): On this day in history, back in 1947, the Spruce Goose made its one and only flight. The flying boat was the largest aircraft ever built. It cost $23 million.

One year later, in 1948, Harry Truman was reelected to the U.S. presidency. His victory over Thomas Dewey is considered the biggest upset in presidential election history.

And in 2002, Russians and an American arrived at the international space station. They were the first crew of the ISS, and they spent more than four months on the station.

AZUZ: A U.S. military commander says the keys to his forces being successful are teamwork and the ability to react quickly to different threats. But he`s not talking about troops in the field. His battle is online. Barbara Starr looks at some of the challenges the government has to deal with when warfare takes place on a virtual battlefield.

BARBARA STARR, cnn REPORTER (voice-over): Is cyberspace a war zone? The U.S. Secretary of Defense could not be more clear.

LEON PANETTA, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: The next Pearl Harbor that we confront could very well be a cyber-attack.

STARR (voice-over): There`s already been one serious attack. In 2008, an infected flash drive was inserted into a laptop on a U.S. military base. A foreign spy agency had placed a malicious code on the drive. Secret data was transferred to foreign control. The Pentagon won`t name the suspect country.

On the very day the Pentagon unveiled its plan for operations in cyberspace, another breach revealed.

DEPUTY DEFENSE SECRETARY WILLIAM LYNN: A single intrusion this past March, 24,000 files were taken.

STARR (voice-over): Cyberspace is now full of attacks. Experts warn, however, just hacking into a network or taking down an electric power grid, doesn`t mean an automatic military response.

ROBERT NOONAN, SVP, BOOZ ALLEN: But if, in the course of knocking that electronic grid, if people were to die or you were to knock out hospitals, knock out the ability to provide for services for people, then certainly, I think, that would meet the definition of an act of war.

STARR (voice-over): The new Pentagon strategy focuses on defending military systems from theft and denial or disruption of service. But cyberspace has a particular attraction for attackers.

WILLIAM MARSHALL, MANAGING DIRECTOR, CHERTOFF GROUP: Yet, also, there`s a fairly low cost of entry in this business. They don`t have to have a massive military industrial complex to actually build an offensive capability and employ it.

STARR (voice-over): And if they attack, they can remain largely anonymous, making it difficult to find and target them, becoming the enemy right on the computer screen -- Barbara Starr, cnn, The Pentagon.