Cyberterror

EagleSpeak posts this morning on the dangers of cyberterror. I agree with the warning and would add to the list of the potentially affected industries the banking industry. Look at the havoc done by a few of the Denial of Service attacks (where hackers hijack thousands of unprotected PCs -- those not having up to date virus definitions, for instance -- called "zombies" and use them to launch repeated hits on a website, like Yahoo). These attacks, relatively simple to set up for a good Trojan Horse writer, can bring a site to its knees in minutes, as its servers are overloaded with the page requests flooding in on it. Just imagine if a very determined someone or someones (read: terrorists) decided to find a way to do this to "secure" systems. A serious attack like this could bring our economy to its knees in days.

My fear is that we've put too much of our infrastructure in the vulnerable zone, i.e., attached to the public internet rather than in a secure private network. I hope I am wrong.

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