Different wars for different times. Cofer Black, a former top CIA counterterrorism official, said on Wednesday he sees parallels between the terrorism threat that emerged before the September 11 attacks a decade ago and the emerging cyber threat now.
The question of validation -- judging the severity of the threat and who is behind it -- is just as much an issue now as it was in the lead-up to the September 11 attacks, he told an audience of information security experts at the annual Black Hat conference. Black said he became very familiar with al Qaeda during his 28 years at CIA, including one assassination attempt against himself.