President Obama's CTO: U.S. Needs Data Lockdown

WASHINGTON (TheStreet.com) -- U.S. firms must look beyond the headlines to see the cyber threats lurking within their own businesses, according to federal Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, who warns that sloppy security is leaving the door open for hackers.

The White House IT guru recently sat down with TheStreet.com in Washington to discuss his top priorities at a time when cyber attacks are grabbing the media's attention.

"Whether or not we have lost Twitter for a few hours is challenging for the country, but it doesn't keep me up at night," Chopra said. "What keeps me awake at night would be an attack on our critical private sector infrastructure -- the health care sector, the banking sector, the energy sector."

America's CTO Sees Rosy Tech Future

As America's first-ever federal CTO, Chopra is working closely with Silicon Valley to boost areas such as broadband, health care, and education, as well as supporting the president's cyber-security efforts. With criminals and rogue states a constant threat to American IT infrastructure, Obama's tech team certainly has its work cut out.

High-profile Web sites in the U.S. and South Korea, for example, were recently targeted in an audacious cyber attack, highlighting the threat still posed by hackers and viruses.

The denial-of-service attack attempted to bring down the likes of the New York Stock Exchange and White House Web sites by bombarding them with requests from more than 100,000 infected computers dotted around the globe.

Although he acknowledged the risk posed by this type of threat, Chopra warned that one of the biggest dangers for U.S. companies is their own lax security.