"That [threat] is moving faster than our defenses are moving," Obama said in an interview broadcast on the NBC network on Friday night. "We are vulnerable because we are more digitalized than other countries … We have more at stake if we get into a full scale cyber war."
Obama said that even groups without the resources of governments and nations behind them now had the capabilities to wage disruptive cyber attacks.
"Not just state actors like Russia and China but non state actors [have the capability to] penetrate core functions in our society," he said.
Obama said that despite the increasing threat of hackers he would continue to use emails in his retirement, but he advised Americans not to send anything in emails that they did not mind seeing published at some future time in newspapers.
