Digital Doomsday

Not long ago, cyber-terrorists were Public Enemy Number One. In the summer of 2000, a malicious, reclusive hacker released a computer virus called “I Love You” that raced around the globe, destroying $10 billion worth of data. Spies worldwide scrambled to hunt him down, and newspapers ran horrified above-the-fold coverage. Cyberspace seemed like the scariest place on Earth. Then two planes flew into the World Trade Center — and the real, physical world became instantly scarier. Explosions, destroyed buildings — that’s the stuff that scares the pants off America. So ever since Sept. 11, it’s been hard to get worked up about hackers, viruses and digital mayhem. It all seems like a narcissistic indulgence of the dot-com era, when the Internet was the biggest thing going. When a Manhattan friend recently saw me reading a copy of Black Ice, he scoffed: “That stuff is crap. They’re not gonna attack us on the ‘Net. They’re going to set off car bombs in Times Square. They want dead bodies.” This, in a nutshell, is what the book’s author, Dan Verton, is up against. Because he argues that terrorists are indeed developing a new generation of cyberattacks — and they’ll be far worse than anything we could imagine, precisely because we aren’t guarding against them. Full Story