Schmidt Predicts Digital Sky Is Falling

Danse writes "Former Microsoft security chief Howard Schmidt now works for the government as the vice chairman of the Critical Infrastructure Protection Board. According to this article on Security Focus, he has been touring the country, proclaiming the dangers of "zero-day viruses" and "affinity worms" that will create the kind of havoc that nothing else short of a nuclear exchange could cause. "Traffic lights, pacemakers, appliances -- all subject to outages and interruptions because in the future they're controlled via Internet, declares Schmidt. The power grid could fail catastrophically by 2005!" How do you argue with this kind of rhetoric, especially when it's being spread directly by government officials to corporate leaders?"

Comments

Re:There's no hope.

[anonymous_wombat]

I am sure that a government with the resources and technical knowhow of the US government could cause a catastrophic failure of much of our critical infrastructure through software. I do not know how many other governments or organizations also have this ability. It is good that someone is publicizing this threat. Do we want to wait for a catastrophe to happen before taking this seriously?