FBI alarmed by cybercrime

Assistant director to the FBI, Shawn Henry, has revealed that computer attacks pose the biggest threat to national security other than weapons of mass destruction.

Assistant director to the FBI, Shawn Henry, has revealed that computer attacks pose the biggest threat to national security other than weapons of mass destruction.

“Other than a nuclear device or some other type of destructive weapon, the threat to our infrastructure, the threat to our intelligence, the threat to our computer network is the most critical threat we face,” said Henry.

Henry said terrorist groups could “inflict the same kind of damage on our country, on all our countries, on all our networks, as they did in 2001 by flying planes into buildings”.

Scenarios of cyberterrorisim, like that which took place in the Bruce Willis film Live Free or Die Hard could see countries grind to a halt – as so much of a nation’s infrastructure is now managed by computers….

It seems the internet has also become a weapon of war…

According to reports on news.com, Russian hackers allegedly mounted huge assaults on internet networks in Estonia and Georgia last year, while Palestinian sympathisers have orchestrated attacks against hundreds of Israeli websites in the past few days.

Source: news.com.au