FID: Fear, Incompetence & Doubt

Dr. Stephen Haag spends upwards of 80 hours each week on his computer, mapping out terrorist attacks.

Haag, an expert in emerging technologies, believes the next attack on the U.S. will come not in the form of bombings or military movements, but from terrorists armed with computer keyboards, credit cards and Social Security numbers.

A calculated cyber identity strike could erase or manipulate the identities of millions of Americans, effectively closing the financial markets and crippling the economy. ATMs would fail, airports would shut down, banks would close--all transactions would cease, says Haag, 45, an associate dean at the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver. […]

Read the rest if you must but the gist is this: terrorists buy stolen personal
identifying information (from, say someone who steals a Department of Veteran’s
Affairs laptop); they craft some code that would render your personal
information unrecognizable to computer systems; so now your credit cards don’t
work, you driver’s license comes up invalid, etc.; and the end result is that
everything shuts down because “the system” thinks you don’t exist.

I honestly thought we had past the point where wackiness like this was even on the table. I mean, how many ways can we tweak “weapons of…” to fit someone’s money-making scheme?

Some reality:

• The average American has multiple credit cards that are processed by different card processors
• There are 50 different DMVs
•  There is the Department of State (passport)
•  There are umpteen institutions of higher learning that all issue their own IDs
•  Etc., etc., etc. . . .

Terrorists haven’t moved past the defacing web pages stage of technical threat and suddenly they’re going to be producing uber-code that in one fell swoop zaps you from virtual existence? The airports will shut down because 1 in 10 IDs are invalid? Last time I checked the rent-a-cop looks at your picture, the name on the license, the name on the boarding pass and if they match, off you go. 

If you’ve got the skill to zap multiple, complex systems – whether it is with insiders or from afar – you’re not going to waste your time targeting Johnny Citizen; it’s
called “the war on terror” not “the war on inconvenience.”