Six months from now China sends an invasion armada steaming across the straits of Taiwan. The still-green Bush White House faces a fresh national security crisis. To discourage Washington from coming to Taiwan's aid, the People's Liberation Army information warfare units quietly take aim at the US network infrastructure. First, they attack computer networks at the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ, disrupting trading for several hours every day for a week. Investors fly into a panic. Then an air traffic control tower at O'Hare goes offline, diverting hundreds of flights to Detroit, Indianapolis, and St. Louis, shuttering the nation's busiest airport for three days. What next? The computer networks that power one or all of the massive retail banksâ€"-like Chase, or Citibank, or Wells Fargoâ€"-go down for four days. Dallas loses power for 24 hours. Then Atlanta. Then Denver. The Grand Coulee Dam's spillway opens, causing flooding along the Columbia River. Would we even know where these attacks came from? Or that a hostile political force was responsible? Most likely, no.
Beyond China, experts like Dan Kuehl of the National Defense University add to the list of potential cyberthreats: Russia, Iraq, Libya, and terrorist groups like Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaedaâ€"-plus a slew of friendly nations including Japan, France, Norway, England, Australia, South Korea, and Israel. The US Department of Defense, to be sure, is also honing its skills. It launched a cyberattack against Serbia and Slobodan Milosovic during the 1999 NATO bombing campaign.
Most experts believe the United States is widely exposed to this kind of attack. As you read this, US networks are undergoing large-scale probing and mapping. "As a country we are still terribly underprepared," says John Arquilla, an associate professor of information technology at the Naval Postgraduate School. "We haven't seen anything that serious happen yet, but it's coming."
