Cyberweapon War Warning Issued

It used to be that wars were fought with guns, tanks and men slugging it out.  Today we live in a world that is 100% reliant on computers.  They control virtually EVERYTHING that enables the Western world to function...from stoplights to power grids, from satellites to banking transactions.

So of course if a nation wanted to wipe out another nation they could design some type of virus to shut down its computers...and chaos would ensue.

With that as a backdrop, this headline that just appeared on Google News is interesting...and maybe prophetic.

Expert Issues a Cyberwar Warning

MOSCOW — When Eugene Kaspersky, the founder of Europe’s largest antivirus company, discovered the Flame virus that is afflicting computers in Iran and the Middle East, he recognized it as a technologically sophisticated virus that only a government could create.       

He also recognized that the virus, which he compares to the Stuxnet virus built by programmers employed by the United States and Israel, adds weight to his warnings of the grave dangers posed by governments that manufacture and release viruses on the Internet. 

“Cyberweapons are the most dangerous innovation of this century,” he told a gathering of technology company executives, called the CeBIT conference, last month in Sydney, Australia. While the United States and Israel are using the weapons to slow the nuclear bomb-making abilities of Iran, they could also be used to disrupt power grids and financial systems or even wreak havoc with military defenses.        

A growing array of nations and other entities are using online weapons, he says, because they are “thousands of times cheaper” than conventional armaments.       

Here;  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/technology/cyberweapon-warning-from-kaspersky-a-computer-security-expert.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

Can you imagine what would happen if power grids supplying major cities in the USA were shut down for days, weeks or months because of a cyber attack?

Isn't it interesting that NBC has been airing ads for its new TV series called REVOLUTION which is a series built around the story of a time in the future when all of the U.S. goes dark for years?

Certainly truth IS stranger than fiction.