The idea of Third World cyberpunks threatening the planet's sole superpower might seem unlikely unless, of course, you run Internet sites at Lackland AFB or 86 other facilities their group, the Pakistan Hackerz Club, has struck in the past five months. It may be the truth, or a boast.
Nobody can be sure.
But in a week that saw another group, hV2k, strike Internet sites operated by the Texas Department of Public Safety and five other state agencies, it's impossible to dismiss the growing threat posed by an invisible army of computer hackers. Cyberwarfare, the use of computers to attack critical functions of society, already has occurred. Taiwan and China have sparred over the Internet in recent months. Cyberbattles also were waged by Serbs against NATO Web sites during the Kosovo conflict. The threat of cyberwar is so great that a Clinton administration plan calls for using a sophisticated software system to monitor nonmilitary government networks and a second one to track networks used in transportation, telecommunication and banking.