Electronic Pearl Harbour

Leading security expert Professor Bill Caelli says Australian organisations are taking the threat of cyber terrorism nowhere near seriously enough. Terrorism today is about working small, smart and fast. Known as asymmetric warfare, the new terrorism is not about taking hostages, it’s about using the least resources to create the greatest damage. As global tension boils over, the great fear is that asymmetric warfare lends itself perfectly to cyber terrorism. Wielded remotely, the Internet can become a potent weapon to immobilise a nation’s critical infrastructure. Distinguished security expert, Professor Bill Caelli, believes it’s just a matter of time before this happens on a national scale. “The problem we’ve got is the likelihood that a national information infrastructure will be attacked in order to bring down critical national infrastructure,” says Caelli. “In the US, they talk about it as an electronic Pearl Harbour.” Caelli is a veteran of computer security with 30 years’ experience in this area. Currently head of the school of software engineering and data communications at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), he is also an officer (AO) in the general division of the Order of Australia. Among other things, he is on the board of the international security body, the Colloquium for Information Systems, and is a member of the Vienna-based Information Federation for Information Processing technical committee 11 on information systems security. Full Story