Russia and China both now have the capacity to carry out critical cyberattacks on other nations that is significantly ahead of American capacity to defend against such attacks, a new government report says. The report from the United States government’s ” Defense Science Board Task Force on Cyber Deterrence was based on a two-year analysis. It says: The United States gains tremendous economic, social and military advantages from cyberspace. However, our pursuit of these advantages has created extensive dependencies on highly vulnerable information technologies and industrial control systems. As a result, U.S. national security is at unacceptable and growing risk. Over the past several years, the United States has been subjected to cyberattacks and costly cyber intrusions by various actors ….
Some examples of such attacks have been China’s ongoing cybertheft of the intellectual property of American companies, and Russia’s hacking and publishing data from various American organizations in an effort to erode confidence in the U.S. political system.
The report says such incidents as these stand out from the  HYPERLINK “http://map.norsecorp.com/” \l “/” \t “_blank” constant onslaught of cyber intrusions assailing the U.S. on a daily basis because “their impact goes beyond data collection, to impose some form of harm on the United States.”
The report continues: Major powers (e.g., Russia and China) have a significant and growing ability to hold U.S. critical infrastructure at risk via cyberattack, and an increasing potential to also use cyber to thwart U.S. military responses to any such attacks. This emerging situation threatens to place the United States in an untenable strategic position. Although progress is being made to reduce the pervasive cyber vulnerabilities of U.S. critical infrastructure, the unfortunate reality is that, for at least the next decade, the offensive cyber capabilities of our most capable adversaries are likely to far exceed the United States’ ability to defend key critical infrastructures.