Militaries scramble for cyber skills

With growing worries about the threat of "cyber warfare", militaries around the world are racing to recruit the computer specialists they believe may be central to the conflicts of the 21st century.

But while money is plentiful for new forces of "cyber warriors", attracting often individualistic technical specialists and hackers into military hierarchies is another matter. Finding the people to command them is also tough. After a decade of messy and relatively low-tech ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, some senior western officers are if anything less confident with technology such as smartphones and tablet computers than their civilian contemporaries.

But with the Pentagon saying its computers are being attacked millions of times every day, time is short. "We are busy and we are getting busier every day," Lt Gen Rhett Hernandez, a former artillery officer who now heads US Cyber Command, told a cyber security conference in London last month organised by British firm Defence IQ.