Scientific American ran an interview with Former U.S. Air Force Chief Scientist Mark Maybury who “Likens U.S. Cybersecurity Challenge to Whac-A-Mole.”

Maybury says: “The amount of malware is growing exponentially. There are approximately three million pieces of malware in existence today and we project that number will grow to something like 200 million unique pieces by 2025. That’s going to make cyberspace a much more challenging environment to defend, probably even more difficult moving forward than space or air, which themselves are very contested [military] environments.”