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CyberTerrorism - Reality or FUD?
Random Utinni writes "The director of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit (part of Homeland Security) claims that terrorist hackers are poised to create total chaos. He predicts all sorts of scenarios, from changing the formulae for medications to causing cars to explode after a few weeks of driving. Is this guy fearmongering for an increased budget, or is he on to something here?"
Running. Hookers don't run.
You're confusing the cause of the problem with what would have been the results if it had not been taken care of.
I worked on Y2K remediations that impacted everything from payroll to fire alarm systems. Another was responsible for scheduling medical supply deliveries to EMT rigs. I know people who worked on phone systems (911 dialing, anyone?), hospital HVAC, food storage systems, and water treatment facilities.
Why no big problem? Because we all worked our asses off, that's why. Calendar roll-forward trials on paralllel copies of the systems produced everything from total failures of HVAC to people not getting paid and medical shipments dying in the freight schedules. Those things were only avoided because they were fixed. Should the people who originally paid for those systems have not cut the corner, or pressed their original engineers on the issue? Sure. But they didn't. Just like the people that designed much of what's still vulnerable today - only instead of the calendar, it's accidents and malice to fret about.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
No you should exclude the deaths of americans in Iraq, since I presume you've never been to Iraq and never will (and for the people who do, their odds should be calculated differently). If you calculate the odds for an american to die from terrorism, well normally you should use last year's figure but that wouldn't fun because IIRC from 2002 to now no american died from terrorism on the american territory (correct me if i'm wrong) so let's just use almost 5-year old 9/11 so you can have odds different than 0.
So with 3,000 death (from wikipedia : "At least 2,986 people were killed in total") for about 300,000,000 people (from wikipedia : "As of July 2006, there are an estimated 298,444,215 people in the United States") in 6 years, you have, provided that we consider that another 9/11 might happen within the next 6 years, which is quite unlikely, 1 out of 600,000 odds of dying from terrorism within a one-year period.
No good reason to be scared, according to me, but if you're one of the persons who think they are likely to win lottery, you should be crapping your pants.
You just got troll'd!