Today’s Threat: Computer Network Terrorism

“Carry out all my demands or the entire country’s electricity will be cut off.” Is this another line from a suspense film, or is it a palpable threat made possible with a computer keyboard? “Today, there is a growing trend amongst hackers around the world to threaten national infrastructures for ransom,” says Dr. Yaniv Levyatan, an expert in information war at the University of Haifa.

If someone still thinks that this is science fiction, Dr. Levyatan notes how just recently, in November 2009, Brazil’s electricity was blacked out for more than an hour. “It is still not clear what happened, but one assumption is that it was a cyber -terror attack,” he suggests, adding that in 2007 Estonia’s computer infrastructures were attacked, most likely by Russian hackers, bringing the country to a near standstill for about 48 hours.

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Tags: computer infrastructures, computer network, electricity, information war, national infrastructures, ransom, russian hackers, terror attack, terrorism

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 10:38 am and is filed under Civilization, Consider This, Dire Warnings, Innovation We Don't Need, Internet War, Need to Know, Project Energy, Science Digest / Science Daily, Shape of Things to Come?, disruptive innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.