Before you read this article, I want to preface this with Friday evenings events in Seattle. I was in Seattle, and discovered that I could not make a call on a Cingular phone. I also could not make a call on another Cingular phone. Odd. Since I did not have a landline I went to the closest Cingular location, the mall.

The mall was dark, and all around the area was partially backened out. Many businesses were closed, and lots of people were trying unsuccessfully to make calls on their cells. I found the Cingular store and they too were unable to do ANY business. They could not sell, and did not have any connection to the Cingular network.

All this aparently stemmed from a power interuption that I kind of witnesses as my UPS made repeated clicking noises for almost a full minute. By hacking important infrastructures, it is possible to cause panic, immobilization, and non-communication on a wide scale.



"The country's problem with cybersecurity is very serious, and is going to get worse in the next five years before it gets any better," Cliff Lau, chairman of the Research and Development Policy Committee of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers-USA, told Today's Engineer.

The United States' information technology infrastructure is "highly vulnerable to terrorist and criminal attacks," an expert has said.

The I.T. infrastructure includes air traffic control systems, power grids and financial systems.

"The country's problem with cybersecurity is very serious, and is going to get worse in the next five years before it gets any better," Cliff Lau, chairman of the Research and Development Policy Committee of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers-USA, told Today's Engineer.

"I would say the situation not only is alarming, but is almost out of control," Lau said.

Study author Barton Reppert, who interviewed two members of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, noted that 100,000 known viruses and worms exist, and that some major end-users are throwing out infected systems rather than trying to fix them.

Nevertheless, according to the advisory committee, there is little federal budgetary support for fundamental research to address the security vulnerabilities of the civilian I.T. infrastructure, including defense systems.

The report was published in the August issue of IEEE-USA Today's Engineer.



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