The report in the Wall Street Journal quotes intelligence officials saying that cyber-spies last year repeatedly gained access to the system powering everything from financial institutions to sewage systems.

"The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid," the daily said quoting an unidentified senior intelligence official, and "so have the Russians."

While no damage was caused, investigators found time bomb style viruses sown into the system. "If we go to war with them, they will try to turn them on," the official was quoted as saying.

Amy Kudwa, spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said she was "not aware of any disruption to the power grid."

However, she acknowledged that "cyber attacks are made all the time."

Barack Obama, the most Internet-savvy president in US history, has pledged to expand the use of the Internet across the country. Among the projects is a major overhaul, with increasing reliance on computer networks, of the electric grid.

That adds to pressure to defend against the growing army of cyber assailants.

On Tuesday the Pentagon revealed that more than 100 million dollars had been spent just in the last six months to repair damage from attacks.

Kudwa said that DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano "takes the issue of cyber security very seriously, which is why she has ordered a top-to-bottom review of all our cyber security."

The DHS and private industry "continuously looks for and mitigates those attacks," she said.

But the challenge is spiraling.

"We're spending vast amounts of money trying to improve security, but computer security is a moving target. It's a journey without destination," said John Bumgarner at Cyber Consequences Unit, which advises the government.

Evan Kohlmann, an investigator with Global Terror Alert, said cyber assailants were capable of replicating the accidental power outage briefly shutting down New York in 2003.

That incident resulted from a fault in power lines, but a hacker controlling the grid could inflict similar or even worse disruption.

"That was just the power going off briefly. Imagine if worse things started to happen. If you induced power surges you could cause very, very serious permanent damage," Kohlmann said. "You could cause mass economic damage."

Although terrorist groups might consider such targets, the most skilled and motivated hackers are in China and Russia, analysts say.

"Both (China and Russia) are particularly interested in enlisting their populace. The Chinese government has either allowed to flourish or has encouraged many patriotic hackers and the Russian government too," said Noah Shachtman, an editor at Wired magazine.

Bumgarner, a government special operations veteran and hacking expert, said that many attacks on the grid aim not to cause damage, but to steal information.

"Some could be just to extract data to increase the efficiency of their own systems," he said.

Kohlmann said countries like China and Russia, which are rivals but also partners to the United States, are not interested in causing major damage -- at least now.

"It appears their aim is not to disrupt the systems now, but to ensure that if these states were ever in a position where they have their backs against the wall that they have another option to atomic weapons or whatever."

The more immediate threat is that the hacking expertise gets out from under government control.

"Once you have the genie out of the bottle and people able to do this, soon it won't be a team of people in a government lab," Kohlmann said. "It's really only a matter of time before non-state actors can get in."

Bumgarner said that cyberspace has become a fully fledged front in national security, along with air, land, sea and space.

"The United States' digital footprint touches all across the world, just as theirs touches ours."

earlier related report
Growing threat from cyber attacks: US general
Washington (AFP) April 7 - Cyber attacks pose an increasingly serious and costly threat to US government and commercial networks, a US general warned on Tuesday.

The attacks range from relatively simple attempts by teenagers to highly sophisticated cyber assaults, General John Davis, deputy commander of the joint task force for global operations, told AFP.

Although there were safeguards for military networks, attacks on commercial networks also were cause for concern, Davis said.

"Even the indirect threat is of concern to us because a lot of our systems in the military ride over the commercial infrastructure," he said.

The Pentagon several months ago was faced with "a particular worm that was concerning us that intruded into our military networks," Davis said.

Last year the Defense Department prohibited the use of external computer flash drives to counter a virus threat.

The Defense Department spent more than 100 million dollars in the past six months reparing the damage done by the cyber attacks, said Davis by telephone from a conference in Nebraska.

The money was spent on technology and technicians -- including contractors -- to respond to the cyber attacks, he said.

As an example, he said cleaning up a single affected computer cost between 5,000 to 7,000 dollars.

But Davis said it was crucial to invest in preventing the cyber attacks instead of spending money afterward.

"It would be a much wiser investment of resources to do that in a pro-active manner so we were preventing these things from being able to get into our networks."

Davis welcomed plans presented Monday by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to fund an increase in cyber experts with stepped-up training efforts.

Under the secretary's recommendations, the Pentagon would aim to train 250 cyber experts a year instead of the current 80 students.

President Barack Obama has put a priority on cyber security and ordered an elaborate review of the issue.

A top US cybersecurity official quit last month, complaining in a resignation letter that US cyber protection efforts were flawed and dominated by the super-secret National Security Agency (NSA).

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