Talk:Lecture 13
--Gorchard 00:41, 24 November 2005 (PST) - I had an interesting thought while watching the PBS "Cyber-War" program that someone linked to back in the discussion page of lecture 5 or so. The cyber attack that we want to avoid at all costs is a terrorist attack aimed at taking down power grids, communications, or other critical infrastructure. So perhaps non-terrorist cyber attacks of recent years, especially those created 'just for fun', have actually benefitted us more than they've harmed us. They have alerted us to the extreme vulnerabilities in computers on the internet and the possible damage that could be done...and in response we've become much more aware and started to design systems and implement measures to make such attacks more difficult. One argument against that might be that those attacks have also alerted terrorists to the attack opportunities available via the internet, but I feel there is a 'bright side' to attacks and viruses of recent years that might be overlooked.
