On Bush’s Watch, U.S. Suffered Its “Electronic Pearl Harbor”

Sunday’s 60 Minutes featured a pretty terrifying report on the potential threat the United States faces from cyberterrorism. It’s territory that the show has mined before.

As Steve Kroft pointed out at the outset of the report, the show had “less than a decade ago” gone to the Pentagon to learn more about how computers could be used by hackers “as a weapon.” “Much of it was still theory,” Kroft related, “But we were told that before too long, it might be possible for a hacker with a computer to disable critical infrastructure in a major city, and disrupt essential services, to steal millions of dollars from banks all over the world, infiltrate defense systems, extort millions from public companies, even sabotage our weapons systems.”

Eep! Sounds like someone better get on that, before something terrible happens! Except guess what, something terrible already did. “Plus a lot that we don’t even know about,” Kroft said. Great.

Enter Jim Lewis, who directs the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who says that the United States experienced its “electronic Pearl Harbor” in 2007:

Full Story On Bush’s Watch, U.S. Suffered Its “Electronic Pearl Harbor”.

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