Do a Google search for the term "cyber attacks" and you'll get 658,000 responses. You'll find articles with warnings about terrorists using computers to try to hack into the computer networks that run power plants, atms, air traffic control computers and water plants. Much of the response to these warnings has been a collective yawn, calling it warnings about the use of "weapons of mass disruption." But the insiders tell a much different story.
There are documented cases of hackers, who could be terrorists or members of organized crime, who got into the computer networks that power companies use to operate power plants and the distribution of electricity and threatened to cause damage if the company didn't pay up. No damage was done, but a demonstration by researchers last year, on behalf of The Department of Homeland Security, showed it was possible to hack into a company computer and cause a generator to self-destruct.
(http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/09/26/power.at.risk/index.html)
The director of the Computer Forensics Lab at the Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center, told me that military, government and industry computers are targeted everyday. Frequent targets are critical infrastructure, military computer networks and the computers of defense contractors. The goal of the intrusion attempts and sometimes successes, is to cause damage and steal military secrets. Imagine one of our enemies learning how to counter all our latest weapons systems or the ability to disable a key military computer network, right before an attack by terrorists. If another country or terrorist group used a bomb to blow up a critical hub for communication, would that be considered an act of war? What if they used the internet to gain access to the computers that run that communication hub and were able to damage it in a similar way? Would that be an act of war? Would the same results be seen differently because the building was still standing? Those who see these daily attacks, investigate them and work to prevent them, tell me that thousands of attacks are made on these targets daily. A successful attack might not risk many lives, but what about the ripple effect. On 9/11, terrorists struck in New York and Washington D.C., but the ripple effect is still being felt today, all across our country and by the service members and civilians who are in Iraq and Afghanistan today.
More reading:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/may/17/topstories3.russia
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/29/technology/29estonia.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/639
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cyberwar/
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/06/cyberwar.html
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