And yet, many in public life and among our citizenry remain skeptical or downright dismissive of any potential dangers. After all, it is difficult to visualize a cyber threat in the same way that we saw film clips of Hitler s legions marching across Europe, the results of Japan s attack on Pearl Harbor, or Soviet missiles on parade in Red Square. There are other problems with getting people to take these threats seriously. While it may be scary in the abstract, it does not easily lend itself to images of fear, making it difficult to personalize for most Americans. Today our real assets are stored electronically, not in Fort Knox and the targets are increasingly not government and military installations, but rather public and private computer network systems.
Information warfare extends the battlefield to incorporate all of society.
The myth persists that the United States has not been invaded since 1812, but invasion through cyberspace is now a daily occurrence. The threat spectrum ranges from ankle biters1 to nations, with currently no readily available means to discern who is committing the attack. Additionally, smoking keyboards are hard to find as an assailant can loop and weave from country to country in a matter of nanoseconds. Thus, an attack initiated a couple of blocks away can be made to appear to come from halfway around the world. All of this happens while law enforcement is forced to stop at jurisdictional boundaries, defined by the physical world which have no meaning in cyberspace.