Submission Summary: 0 pending, 22 declined, 12 accepted (34 total, 35.29% accepted)
"Nobody's come up with a way to prevent this from happening, even here in the U.S.," said Tom Burling, acting chief executive of Tulip Systems, an Atlanta, Georgia, Web-hosting firm that volunteered its Internet servers to protect the nation of Georgia's Web sites from malicious traffic.
Major utilities, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, may be wide open.
"This is such a crucial issue. At every level, our security now is dependent on computers," said Scott Borg, director of the United States Cyber Consequences Unit, a nonprofit research institute. "It's a whole new era. Political and military conflicts now will almost always have a cyber component. The chief targets will be critical infrastructure, and the attacks will emerge from within our own computer systems."
Botnets are of course being blamed in this one case. But we can assume a well resourced opponent would not just hire out such a potentially devastating pre-emptive attack.
Variables don't; constants aren't.