"Lock your doors," Air Force General Robert Kehler told space and cyber industry executives at a conference in Colorado on Tuesday. The Pentagon said the spending would be used to beef up U.S. defenses against increasing cyber attacks, as well as boosting its offensive capabilities. The Stuxnet computer virus, which was discovered in 2010 after it was used to attack a uranium enrichment facility in Iran, is widely believed to have been developed by the United States and Israel. Separately, the House Intelligence Committee passed a bill to remove legal barriers that have prevented the government and private companies from protecting their networks against foreign hackers, including tough provisions aimed at protecting privacy. Representative Dutch Ruppersberger, the top Democrat on the committee, on Monday said the modified bill had a better chance of winning support in the Senate this year after privacy concerns derailed similar legislation last year. A year later, what's changed? This is just getting more and more serious," Ruppersberger told hundreds of industry executives at a cyber conference hosted by the Space Foundation. He cited government estimates that U.S. businesses had lost more than $400 billion in intellectual property to cyber espionage. Congressman Jim Langevin, co-founder of the Congressional Cybersecurity Caucus, said the new bill included measures aimed at ensuring private information was not unwittingly exposed during any information-sharing between industry and government. For instance, the bill encourages the private sector to "anonymize" or "minimize" the information it voluntarily shares with the government, and authorizes and encourages the government to create procedures to protect privacy. It also puts in place restrictions on the use, retention, and searching of any data voluntarily shared by the private sector with the government, and permits individuals to sue the federal government for any such disclosures Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal-Esa in Colorado Springs, Colorado; Editing by Alistair Bell, Will Dunham and Mohammad Zargham