Many countries IT infrastructure has undergone a dramatic transformation over the last decade. Explosive growth in the use of networks to connect various IT systems has made it relatively easy to obtain information, to communicate, and to control these systems across great distances. Because of the tremendous productivity gains and new capabilities enabled by these networked systems, they have been incorporated into a vast number of civilian applications, including education, commerce, science and engineering, and entertainment. They have also been incorporated into virtually every sector of the countrys critical infrastructure - including communications, utilities, etc.

Any countrys information technology (IT) infrastructure, still evolving from world technological innovations such as the personal computer and the Internet, today is a vast fabric of computers - from supercomputers to handheld devices - and interconnected networks enabling high-speed communications, information access, advanced computation, transactions, and automated processes relied upon in every sector of society. Because much of this infrastructure connects one way or another to the Internet, it embodies the Internets original structural attributes of openness, inventiveness, and the assumption of good will.

Cyber attacks in the past were generally relatively one-dimensional, mainly in the form of denial of service (DoS) attacks, computer viruses or worms, or unauthorized intrusions (hacking). These attacks were mainly launched against websites, mail servers or client machines. This has fundamentally changed recently - cyber threats are undergoing a diversification that is resulting in multi-vector threat weapons that utilize and/or target a variety of attack tools and technologies.