Cyberwarzone.com is a Web site that lists 270 books about Internet crime and warfare. In one of the highest-profile examples, “Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It,” Richard A. Clarke, the former U.S. counterterrorism chief, and Robert K. Knake of the Council on Foreign Relations, describe a digital “Day After” in which large parts of the U.S. transportation, energy and communications systems have been wiped out by Internet-borne attackers, leaving the authorities struggling to maintain control and consumers scrambling for food.
Prophets of Internet-borne Gotterdammerung have gotten even more breathless since the publication of “Cyber War” last year. They describe China’s alleged hacking campaign against Google and the campaign by “hacktivists” against foes of the anti-secrecy Web site WikiLeaks, as the opening acts.
Is a cyberwar already under way and, if so, could it really cause destruction on the scale portrayed by Mr. Knake and Mr. Clarke?
Nonsense, say two academics in a study commissioned by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The report, to be released Monday, argues that doomsayers have greatly exaggerated the power of belligerents to wreak havoc in cyberspace.
It is extremely unlikely that their attacks could create problems like those caused by a global pandemic or the recent financial crisis, let alone an actual shooting war, the study concludes.
“You have this sort of competition between writers to say, ‘I have a scarier story than you do,’ ” said Peter Sommer, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, who wrote the report with Ian Brown, a senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, part of Oxford University. “If you look at the way it is covered, the computer scare story of the week, you might get the sense that such a disaster is just around the corner.”
In fact, the…