also joining us is catherine lotrionte. she is the director of the cybersecurity project at georgetown university. she served in the general counsel office at the cia and also worked on the president's foreign intelligence advisory board board during the george w. bush administration. alan paller is the founder and research director of the sans institute which teaches cybersecurity training and he was also an adviser adviser to both president clinton and president bush administrations at different levels. thank you all for being here today. we sure appreciate it. if i could start with a question for all three of you and mr. paller we will start with you. how would you assess the cybersecurity threat currently facing the u.s. and are we doing enough to confront it? >> guest: they are explosive, they are expansive, they are getting larger and they are getting more sophisticated and although we are doing a lot we are falling further and further behind every week. >> host: why? >> guest: because the technology of the attackers

also joining us today was catherine lotrionte, who is director of the cybersecurity project at georgetown university, ph.d. from georgetown university, law degree from new york university and alan paller founder and research director of the sans institute, degrees from cornell and m.i.t.. mr. paller very quickly what is the sans institute in how did you get involved in this type of work? >> guest: sans is the main training organization. we have trained 20,000 people year in the techniques that they are used to -- computers and exploit computers. i got involved because the software companies sold to another company in the security area and learned it that way. >> host: do you train a lot of government folks? >> guest: more commercial and defense industrial base of a small number of government folks in law enforcement particular and the intelligence community. >> host: catherine lotrionte how did you get involved in working in the general counsel office of the cia and cybersecurity? >> guest: so my background in cyber started actually at cia when i was given the information warfare account

. >> host: catherine lotrionte. >> guest: maybe i'm a little more optimistic or hold out the hope that we're not there yet. the anniversary is very close. i think still the biggest threat, especially on an anniversary like this, is similar to 9/11, conventional terrorist attack. >> guest: so there is a classified example of a cyber attack that resulted in multiple deaths, and what we know from that we can start to assess the e effectiveness of this as a weapon. and it's not that powerful. you can hurt a few people, that's bad, of course, but i don't think you could get a 9/11. you could have more fun doing something else. you could, you know, mess up the financial system. you could turn off the electrical power. but casualties in the thousands would be difficult to achieve using cyber attack. >> host: and we are out of time, unfortunately. very quickly, jim lewis is a director of the technology and public policy program at csis. he got his ph.d. a at the university of chicago. also joining us today was catherine lotrionte who is director of the cybersecurity project at georgetown unive