WASHINGTON– The federal government is struggling to fill a growing demand for skilled computer-security workers at a time when network attacks are rising in frequency and sophistication.

Demand is so intense that it has sparked a bidding war among agencies and contractors for a small pool of special talent: skilled technicians with security clearances. Their scarcity is driving up salaries, depriving agencies of skills and in some cases affecting project quality, industry officials said.

The crunch hits as the Pentagon is attempting to staff a new Cyber Command to fuse offensive and defensive computer-security missions and the Department of Homeland Security plans to expand its own cyber-force by up to 1,000 people in the next three years.

Even President Obama struggled to fill one critical position: Seven months after pledging to name a national cyber-adviser, the White House on Tuesday announced that Howard Schmidt, a former Bush administration official and Microsoft chief security officer, will lead the nation’s efforts to better protect its critical computer networks.

The lack of trained defenders for these networks is leading to serious gaps in protection and significant losses of intelligence, national security experts said. The Government Accountability Office told a Senate panel in November that the number of scans, probes and attacks reported to the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team has more than tripled, from 5,500 in 2006 to 16,840 in 2008.

“We know how we can be penetrated,” said Sen. Benjamin Cardin, D-Md., chairman of the Judiciary subcommittee on terrorism and homeland security. “We don’t know how to prevent it effectively.”

Indeed, the protection of critical computer systems and sensitive data, said former National Security Agency director William Studeman, may be the “biggest single problem” facing the national security establishment today.

A pillar of the federal government’s effort to develop talent is the National Science Foundation’s Scholarship for Service program, which pays for up to two years of college in exchange for an equal number of years of federal service. But the program has placed fewer than 1,000 students since its inception in 2001.

The career of a 30-year-old computer scientist named Brian Denny shows how the government is often outbid by the private sector in recruiting cyber-warriors.

Denny earned a computer science master’s degree in 2004 from Purdue University on an NSF scholarship. In return, he spent two years at the National Security Agency, identifying novel security flaws in computer systems and software.

Then Booz Allen Hamilton, a major intelligence contractor, hired him at a 45 percent pay raise.

Today, Denny works for a small employee-owned firm that has federal government and private-sector contracts, and his pay is higher still.

“You can still do a lot of cool national-security-related work as a contractor,” said Denny, chief security architect for Ponte Technologies in Ellicott City, Md., near the NSA. “The pay difference is so dramatic now, you can’t ignore it.”

Some young people with three years’ experience and a clearance are commanding salaries of $100,000.