Major Cyber Attack Will Cause Significant Loss of Life By 2025, Experts Predict

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.defenseone.com/threats/2014/10/cyber-attack-will-cause-significant-loss-life-2025-experts-predict/97688/

By Patrick Tucker
Defense One
October 29, 2014

A major cyber attack will happen between now and 2025 and it will be large 
enough to cause “significant loss of life or property losses/damage/theft 
at the levels of tens of billions of dollars,” according to more than 60 
percent of technology experts interviewed by the Pew Internet and American 
Life Project.

But other experts interviewed for the project “Digital Life in 2015,” 
released Wednesday, said the current preoccupation with cyber conflict is 
product of software merchants looking to hype public anxiety against an 
eternally unconquerable threat.

It’s the old phantom of the “cyber Pearl Harbor,” a concept commonly 
credited to former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta but that is actually as 
old as the world wide web. It dates back to security expert Winn 
Schwartau’s testimony to Congress in 1991, when he warned of an 
“electronic Pearl Harbor” and said it was “waiting to occur.” More than 
two decades later, we’re still waiting. The Pew report offers, if nothing 
else, an opportunity to look at how the cyber landscape has changed and 
how it will continue to evolve between now and 2025.


Potential Infrastructure Vulnerabilities

A key concern for many of the experts Pew interviewed is infrastructure, 
where very real cyber vulnerabilities do exist and are growing. Stewart 
Baker, former general counsel for the National Security Agency and a 
partner at Washington, D.C.-based law firm Steptoe & Johnson told Pew, 
“Cyberwar just plain makes sense. Attacking the power grid or other 
industrial control systems is asymmetrical and deniable and devilishly 
effective. Plus, it gets easier every year. We used to worry about Russia 
and China taking down our infrastructure. Now we have to worry about Iran 
and Syria and North Korea. Next up: Hezbollah and Anonymous.”

[...]

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