I ws listening to KPBS and they were airing an interview w/Richard Clarke, author of Cyber War. It was a little scary. The interview is rather in depth 45 minutes and worth a listen, more than what’s posted on their site. Highlights of some of the text:

“A cyberattack could disable trains all over the country,” he tells Fresh Air host Terry Gross. “It could blow up pipelines. It could cause blackouts and damage electrical power grids so that the blackouts would go on for a long time. It could wipe out and confuse financial records, so that we would not know who owned what and the financial system would be badly damaged. It could do things like disrupt traffic in urban areas by knocking out control computers. It could, in nefarious ways, do things like wipe out medical records.”

“Clarke says that cyberattacks can come from another country — or from a lone individual. Malicious code may infect a computer via a security flaw in a Web browser, or it could be distributed through secret back doors built into computer hardware”

Clarke says that one common attack is for hackers to take over a series of home computers through backdoor security exploits. For example, malicious software can be downloaded onto a hard drive after you accidentally visit a compromised website. Your computer can then be used in conjunction with other compromised computers to engage in a large-scale attack. The average computer user may not realize when their computer has been drafted into a cyberattack.

“Maybe your computer will be running a little slowly that day,” he says. “Maybe your bandwidth won’t look like it’s normal. But while you’re doing your e-mails, your computer could be sending out denial of service attacks as part of a million other computers all trying to knock off a bank.”