“Cybersecurity is the soft underbelly of this country,” outgoing U.S. National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell declared in a valedictory address to reporters in mid-January. He rated this problem equal in significance to the potential development of atomic weapons by Iran.
McConnell does not worry so much that hackers or spies will steal classified information from computers owned by government or the military, or by contractors working for them on secret projects. He is afraid they will erase it and thereby deprive the United States of critical data. “It could have a debilitating effect on the country,” he said.
With this concern in mind, Forecasting International undertook a study of factors likely to influence the future development of information warfare.
Real-world attacks over the Internet also are possible. In March 2007, the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory conducted an experiment to determine whether a power plant could be compromised by hacking alone. The result was a diesel generator smoking and on fire due to some malicious data that could easily have been sent to it over the Internet from anywhere in the world. In January 2008, a CIA analyst told American utilities that hackers had infiltrated electric companies in several locations outside the United States. In at least one case, they had managed to shut off power to multiple cities.
We conclude that information warfare will be a significant component in most future conflicts. This position is in line with both U.S. military doctrine and white papers published by the Chinese People’s Army. One study affirms that as many as 120 governments already are pursuing information warfare programs.
Repeated reports that Chinese computer specialists have hacked into government networks in Germany, the United States, and other countries show that the threat is not limited to relatively unsophisticated lands. A 2007 estimate suggested that hackers sponsored…