John P. Avlon wants to shake your complacent attitude to the threats to everyday life:
First your cell phone doesn’t work. Then you notice that you can’t access the Internet. Down on the street, ATMs won’t dispense money. Traffic lights don’t function, and calls to 911 don’t get routed to emergency responders. Radios report that systems controlling dams, railroads, and nuclear power plants have been remotely infiltrated and compromised. The air-traffic control system shuts down, leaving thousands of passengers stranded or rerouted and unable to communicate with loved ones. This is followed by a blackout that lasts not hours but days and even weeks. Our digital civilization shudders to a halt. When we emerge, millions of Americans’ data are missing, along with billions of dollars.
This scenario may sound like the latest doomsday blockbuster to come out of Hollywood. But each of the elements described above has occurred over the past decade as the result of a cyber-attack. Cyber-attacks are an accelerating threat, still without generally accepted terminology, effective deterrents, or comprehensive legal remedies. They are weapons of mass disruption, used by adversaries cloaked in anonymity, that could prove at least temporarily crippling to the digital infrastructure of modern society. This kind of attack is attractive to America’s enemies, not only because it allows weaker entities to take on far stronger ones but because it turns our technological strength into a weakness.
