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Forget the app, stop the hack

The White House wants Silicon Valley geeks to take a break from inventing the next hot new app and focus instead on finding ways to stop cyber attacks.

President Obama’s new Defense Secretary Ashton Carter calling on techies to join with the government in protecting America from online assaults from hackers in places such as North Korea, Russia and China.

Yahoo Finance Editor in Chief Andy Serwer says it’s easy to understand why Washington is making this effort.

“Governments are becoming less and less powerful,” he notes. “You look at Wikileaks, Anonymous, ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, Facebook (FB), Twitter (TWTR)-- these are powerful communication forces on the web to one degree or another, and the U.S. is having a very tough time getting their arms around controlling and monitoring. It’s very complicated.”

Plus, Serwer explains, it’s all very new.

“This is completely uncharted territory,” he says. “These global social media networks have never existed before and no one knows where it’s all going.”

Yahoo Finance’s Aaron Task adds the internet also levels the playing field for those who could never stand up to the “conventional” might of the United States.

“You have rogue states like North Korea using cyber to attack interests in the United States, whereas North Korea couldn’t touch U.S. interests otherwise,” he explains. “This is the new face of warfare.”

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The White House is also trying to mend fences with tech companies who have vociferously complained about government intrusion following revelations of U.S. spying by former NSA operative Edward Snowden. But Task calls that nothing more than a bunch of noise.

“The Silicon Valley companies can say all they want about staying an arm’s distance from the government, but they are working with the government and they will work with the government,” he argues. “If the government tells these companies, ‘Hey, you need to do this-- nudge, nudge, wink, wink'-- they’re going to do it because if they don’t they risk the arm of government coming down on them and make business very tough.”

However, Serwer feels both sides are still trying to strike the right balance.

“It is a very awkward dance that they are doing,” he says. “I remember talking to people at Facebook and they were trying to figure out under whose jurisdiction do we operate-- these sort of ecclesiastical questions.”

And Serwer believes the recent attacks on Sony (SNE), Tesla (TSLA) and other firms as well as government sites make it clear that no matter how it’s done, there’s a need to beef up cyber security.

“We could have the ‘hack of the day’ every day here,” he notes.

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