The U.S. Cyber Challenge aims to identify 10,000 patriotic geeks and make them experts

By Joshua Kucera

The potential threats against the United States from malicious foreign hackers are as poorly understood as they are scary. China's military has trained more than 60,000 "information troops," and its official doctrine calls for pre-emptive strikes on networks of nations it sees as a threat.

Russian hackers -- probably with Kremlin support -- have attacked Internet sites in pro-Western Estonia and Georgia. And a mysterious "worm," Conficker, infects an estimated 5 million computers around the world. Authorities don't know who controls it; cyberintelligence expert Jeffrey Carr calls it "the equivalent of a nuclear bomb" that could shut down the entire Internet.

It's the kind of shadowy, nonstate threat that the U.S. defense and intelligence bureaucracies are traditionally ill equipped to fight, but a new initiative announced last week aims to try.

A consortium of government agencies and private organizations has set up a series of competitions, called the U.S. Cyber Challenge, to identify up to 10,000 patriotic geeks and then nurture them to become "top guns," as the Cyber Challenge organizers call them, at the Pentagon, the National Security Agency, and elsewhere. ....