By Robert Green

There is no evidence a hacker can shut down the power grid or crash planes into each other - yet.

The speculation that the massive power outage in northeast North America might have been caused by a hacker or terrorist will likely persist until the actual cause is ascertained. It is fueled in part by a belief that, as the global war on terrorism and other regional conflicts persist, hackers naturally begin to focus on national "enemy" infrastructures, and are also more likely to act in a concerted, organized way-and thus more effectively.

The speculation that the massive power outage in northeast North America might have been caused by a hacker or terrorist will likely persist until the actual cause is ascertained. It is fueled in part by a belief that, as the global war on terrorism and other regional conflicts persist, hackers naturally begin to focus on national "enemy" infrastructures, and are also more likely to act in a concerted, organized way-and thus more effectively. (continued on page 5)

Experts usually pooh-pooh the notion that a clever hacker can "make planes crash into each other" or create some other Hollywood-like calamity with a few diabolical keystrokes. On the other hand, there is much evidence to suggest that these are merely the early days of cyber warfare. Hackers, e-terrorists and online criminals are only likely to get better at what they do-or, so goes the argument.

And they might get more organized too, if what looks like the first full-out cyber war across national borders is a model of how conflicts will be carried out in what the Pentagon calls "Battlespace 4."

That war has been going on between India and Pakistan for several years now, and is apparently being conducted by loosely organized entities such as the Pakistani group that calls itself the "Federal Bureau of Hackers." The "FBH" and other Pakistani cyber warriors are credited with successfully attacking more than 700 web sites in India this year, according to a New Delhi firm that tracks such things.

On India's side, the war has already given birth to the extremely disruptive Yaha-Q email attachment virus that, earlier this year, effected computers in about 100 nations and was used to shut down the Pakistani stock market for a day or two, according to a BBC report.

While the India-Pakistan cyber war seemingly bubbled up out of the cauldron of disputed Kashmir and the ongoing conflict there, some observers believe that colonies of hackers become more obsessed with one-upmanship than doing real damage, defacing the equivalent of "soft targets" in cyberspace just to prove they can.

In fact, observers have noted that even as a state of relative cease-fire took hold in Kashmir's Battlespace 1 (on the ground), hacking increased in what one expert called "a childish game."

It would be easy enough for U.S. interests to shrug much of this off but for the seriousness that follows from it. Any system might get caught in the cross-fire of such an ongoing exchange, regardless of what is motivating it. Also, the Pakistan-India situation has already given rise to the notion that "false flag" operations are easily staged on the Internet, where one side might assume the identity of the other, launch a virus or other type of attack on its own systems, and then sit back while the enemy is blamed.

And even those who would snub the depth of threat that comes from a group called the Federal Bureau of Hackers should beware. In the 1990s one might have as casually laughed off the assertion of Osama bin Laden that al Qaeda operated a "Department of Martyrs."

Robert Green is Public Sector Communications senior editor. Touch base with him at robertgreen@pubsector.net.