Stop the Cyber-Warfare/Terrorism FUD

Every few months another story comes out that talks about the vulnerability of the United States to a cyber-terrorism/warfare/attack.  Today, CNN.com posted another one of these stories.

The fact of the matter is that cyber-warfare is occurring every day.  Every day the network infrastructures of internet service providers, organizations, and every connected network node in the United States and around the world are under siege from network attacks.  Could they all be the type of attack that could bring down a network and cause hundreds, thousands, or millions of dollars in lost productivity?  To some degree, yes.  Botnets hold enormous distributed computing power that, when fully harnessed, are capable of launching distributed denial of service attacks that could overwhelm any network and bring it to its knees.  Everywhere infrastructures are overbuilt in part to manage growth, but in larger part to attempt to protect server farms from becoming overloaded and unresponsive in the event of an attack. 

Spam (the most popular use for botnets) costs in the United States alone are estimated to be in the $200B (with a B) realm for 2008.  That's just email!  That doesn't take into account the number of web sites that are now hosting malware (both sites that were setup for the sole purpose of malware hosting and now legitimate web sites also) with keylogger payloads which leads to problems like identity theft
and corporate espionage which only add to that $200B figure. 

The cyber war is being fought every day with attacks originating from all over the globe aimed at equally dispersed targets.  Although it is true that many of the networks and service providers in the United States can better handle an attack than some in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, bandwidth is still finite and if a botnet launches an attack against you that is larger than your pipes and servers can handle, you have problems and that isn't just a United States issue.