Professor Sir Michael Howard, one of England’s most highly distinguished military historians, has warned that cyber attacks now pose as big of a threat to international security as nuclear weapons.
Sir Howard commented that, based on the advances in individually-utilized technology and our growing interdependence on networks to run our infrastructure, “an entire country can be wiped out by a geeky young man in a back bedroom”
Just in the last year, the advances in international hacking capabilities were seen through the successful theft of 1.4 million security clearances from the U.S. Department of Defense Office of Personal Management, and the enormous take down of the power grid of North Korea for a week. Though these are usually government-sponsored attacks, the risk of having a lone wolf hacker initiate a new World War or catastrophic civil disaster is painfully real.
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