Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/cyber-attacks-on-u-s-government-put-digital-security-in-spotlight Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Recent attacks on government computers, private organizations and foreign governments have raised fresh questions about the nation's digital security. Analysts discuss the implications of the attacks and the vulnerability of the nation's digital systems. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. JIM LEHRER: And still to come on the NewsHour tonight: searching for a job; the Italy summit; and the stimulus debate. That all follows a look at the cyber attacks hitting major U.S. government agencies.Jeffrey Brown has our report. JEFFREY BROWN: The attacks began July 4th weekend targeting computers at the White House, Pentagon, the State, Treasury and Homeland Security departments, among other government agencies, and several private organizations, including the New York Stock Exchange.The other major target: South Korean agencies. Today that country's national intelligence service reportedly told lawmakers there that it believes North Korea or North Korean sympathizers were behind the attacks.We get more now from Randy Sabett, formerly at the National Security Agency, which was also a target of these attacks. He now works on cyber security issues as a lawyer in private practice.And Rod Beckstrom, president of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and former director of the National Cyber Security Center at the Department of Homeland Security.Rod Beckstrom, first, simply, what exactly is a cyber attack? And, specifically, what are these attacks intended to do?ROD BECKSTROM, former director, National Cyber Security Center: Sure. Thank you. You know, a cyber attack is when a hacker, somebody who writes computer code, writes something malicious to attack and infest either one machine or, more likely, a whole network of machines.And then that network of these agents can either be used to commit an act of crime and steal money or to attack government Web sites, as in the case of what we've seen here, where it appears that a hacker wrote some code that was probably mounted on a Web site in South Korea, spread to somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 machines, and then began to send out all these malicious requests to government servers in the U.S., Korea, and some companies. JEFFREY BROWN: Now, Randy Sabett, we now know that these kinds of attacks are not all that uncommon.RANDY SABETT, cybersecurity attorney: Right.