By Heather Greenfield

A House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee spent Tuesday afternoon reviewing government and private-sector efforts to secure the nation's Internet infrastructure. The House Homeland Security Committee held a similar hearing last week.

The attention comes in part because the Homeland Security Department has declared October as Cyber Security Awareness Month, but the hearings are timelier after a recent video leak to the media. It showed an experiment at one of the national laboratories in which a researcher hacked into a power-plant control system and set fire to it with the click of a mouse.

Getting a grasp of the history of improving cyber security is a challenge in part because the threat has changed. Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, said in prepared testimony that as America has moved from vulnerabilities that might have taken months to exploit to the current era of immediate attacks, "just getting information is no longer nearly enough."