Cyber naivete.

• Author: Wolf, Frank R.

First Washington ignored the al Qaeda threat. Now they're doing the same with the cyber threat. It's time to wake up.

My colleague, Representative Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, often says that there only two types of companies in America: those who have been attacked by Chinese cyberattacks and know it, and those who have been attacked but don't yet know it.

Chairman Rogers' comments are particularly prescient, given the enormous costs this cyber espionage is having on Western companies and their competitiveness with state-owned or state-connected Chinese companies, which appear to the be the beneficiaries of this stolen data.

By now, most everyone is aware of the pervasive threat from Chinese cyber espionage and cyber attacks--targeting both government and private business networks. These attacks are no longer just probing for national security information; they are seeking private firms' intellectual property, trade secrets, and any other information that could be used to provide Chinese companies with an unfair advantage over their Western counterparts. It's ultimately undermining job creation in the United States and impacting the economic recovery.

Cyber espionage is having a real and corrosive effect on job creation in the United States and other western countries. Last year, the Washington Post reported that "[t]he head of the military's U.S. Cyber Command, General Keith Alexander, said that one U.S. company recently lost $1 billion worth of intellectual property over the course of a couple of days--'technology that they'd worked on for twenty-plus years--stolen by one of the adversaries.'"

And should there be any confusion about who is responsible for these cyber attacks: Chairman Rogers remarked in an October 2011 Washington Post article that "When you talk to these companies behind closed doors, they describe attacks that originate in China and have a level of sophistication and are clearly supported by a level of resources that can only be a nation-state entity."

Yet despite the constant, pervasive attacks and the enormous associated costs to business and government, the U.S. public and private sectors remain unprepared to adequately defend against, and unwilling to articulate, a response to these Chinese actors.

This is particularly frustrating to me, as an early target of Chinese cyber espionage. In August 2006, my congressional office's computers were attacked by "entities within China," very...