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A new Al Qaeda video calling on followers to carry out cyber attacks on Western targets has alarmed American lawmakers. Senators Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman, who are part of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said that they first learned about the Al Qaeda video last week in a meeting with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. "This tape is really alarming. It's essentially instructing anybody who's sympathetic with Al Qaeda's ideology to engage in cyberattacks, and the tape is telling them how easy it is to do so," Fox News quoted Collins as saying. The six-minute video instructs Al Qaeda followers that the U.S. is vulnerable to cyber attacks in the same way as airlines were vulnerable in 2001 before the September 11 attacks. "The video calls on Muslims with expertise in this domain to target the websites and information systems of big companies and government agencies," Lieberman said. "Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula are focused on cyber warfare because it can be carried out, if you have somebody smart enough, at very little expense," Lieberman added. The senators said the Homeland Security Department took action against 100,000 cyber incidents in 2011. They said that there was a five-fold increase in the number of attacks aimed at industrial control systems. "There has been a huge increase in the number of cyber attacks against our country in the last two years. It would be naive for us to think that Al Qaeda is not responsible for at least some of those attacks," Collins said. Without getting into classified information, Lieberman confirmed that there has been a spike in cyber intrusions, which is believed to originate from Iran.

Al Qaeda video calling for cyber attacks against Western nations alarms US