David E. Sanger Quotes

After all, just one virus on a computer is one too many.

Computer hacking really results in financial losses and hassles. The objectives of terrorist groups are more serious. That is not to say that cyber groups can't access a telephone switch in Manhattan on a day like 9/11, shut it down, and therefore cause more casualties.

The Russians hacked into the Illinois State Board of Elections. They got into the database.

Once cyber crosses into the realm of the physical, then it's a physical attack, but it starts with cyber. And the idea of a cyber attack being able to take control of machines - that becomes a scary process.

A major attack on our cyber systems could shut down our critical infrastructure - financial systems, communications systems, electric grids, power plants, water treatment centers, transportation systems and refineries - that allows us to run our economy and protect the safety of Americans.

I think we could very easily suffer a seriously catastrophic cyber event.

The United States Cyber Command was created partly in response to a Russian hacking attack that long predated the 2016 election.

In the 21st century, our adversaries will continue to use cyberattacks against us. We need to be prepared to defend our networks against this growing threat to our democracy, especially the most fundamental part of our political system: our elections.

The 2016 election, I'm sure, wasn't the first one to be hacked; it was just the first one that was made public.

Distributed ledgers are inherently harder to attack because instead of a single database, there are multiple shared copies of the same database, so a cyber stack would have to attack all the copies simultaneously to be successful.

There are two types of companies: those that have been hacked, and those who don't know they have been hacked.

The sooner we act, the sooner we can start turning the tables on cyberattackers.

It seems Russians hacked into emails from both the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee and then chose to release only the DNC emails. These attacks destabilize and undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral process, and they must be addressed in a serious and proportional way - just as we would for a non-cyberattack.

In a modern digitalized world, it is possible to paralyze a country without attacking its defense forces: The country can be ruined by simply bringing its SCADA systems to a halt. To impoverish a country, one can erase its banking records. The most sophisticated military technology can be rendered irrelevant. In cyberspace, no country is an island.

All of our intelligence agencies, our Department of Defense, are all working to meet this threat. But it's a fast moving world; it's a place where offense is easier than defense, and keeping up with the next innovation in cyber-warfare is an enormous challenge.

The first time cyber was even a panel discussion at the Munich Security Conference, which is - I mean, we've got hundreds of specialists there - was 2011. That's how long it took.

I really didn't understand why hackers would want to hack into a classroom. Are they going to learn algebra? Maybe calculus?

The Internet allows foreign adversaries to attack America in new and unexpected ways. Free and fair elections are hard-fought and contentious. There will always be adversaries who work to exacerbate domestic differences and try to confuse, divide, and conquer us.

After the investigation of Operation Aurora, the cyberattack on Google from within China that was revealed in 2010, I realized a completely new type of security strategy and technology was needed.

We take all potential threats to public and private sector systems seriously and will continue to investigate and hold accountable those who pose a threat in cyberspace.

My view is that the cyber threat is bigger than any one government agency - or even the government itself. But the FBI brings a rare combination of scope and scale, experience, and tools to the mix. We investigate criminal activity like intrusions and cyber attacks, but we also investigate national security threats like foreign influence.

I divide the entire set of Fortune Global 2000 firms into two categories: those that know they've been compromised and those that don't yet know.

Great software has seemingly limitless potential to solve human problems - and it can spread around the world in the blink of an eye. Malicious code moves just as quickly, and when software is created for the wrong reason, it has a huge and growing capacity to harm millions of people.

If a serious and sophisticated attacker has enough time he or she will get into a digital network. Governments and private corporations need to be able to detect an attacker on their network quickly, quarantine him completely and then kick him off.

The big unknown is, at what point is a cyberattack so significant that it warrants a physical-world response.