Are mammoth cyberattacks imminent? Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency and commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, says to . A destructive attack from cyberspace "is coming, in my opinion. It is a question of time. What we can't know for sure is how far out it is," and whether it will target commercial infrastructure, government networks or mobile platforms, the general said during his remarks during last week's Maneuvering in CyberSpace Symposium.

Others last week gave voice to the idea that the U.S. . The Intelligence and National Security Alliance Cyber Council -- said to be a nonprofit, non-partisan, public-private organization -- issued a report on that topic. It said the dilemma is that DHS has the authority but to orchestrate a comprehensive approach to cyber intelligence. The Defense Department has much of the actual cyber intelligence capabilities and private industry owns most of the infrastructure.

Meanwhile, an evil infrastructure of bot armies of compromised computers continues to be assembled, .

There hasn't yet been a standard for point-to-point encryption to be used to protect payment cards from the point-of-sale when sensitive cardholder data is captured and sent into processor networks and banking systems. But the PCI Security Standards Council last week to establish one in releasing guidelines for hardware-based encryption and key management.