I had lunch yesterday with one of our team here who is originally from Russia, and I asked about the current conflict in Georgia. His comments were insightful, and not exactly what we hear as we listen to media reports. Maybe in a future post, I’ll get into those. But the discussion raised my attention level in general. That evening I read a small story in the WSJ on the disruption of internet services on Georgian government sites and raised the question “is cyberattack an act of war?”. It’s a relevant question given the importance of the web and internet in all aspects of daily life. The answer in the article was that we don’t have a policy regarding this question. While a denial of service attack on an informational website may not seem that significant, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. I remember reading a rather sensational article in the National Journal a few months ago which attributed several power outages to incidents of cyberattack. They were never proven, but it seems plausible. We’re already dependant on an internetworked world. The damage to infrastructure or financial systems from a well executed cyberattack could be huge. Not a pleasant topic to be thinking about on verge of a nice summer weekend – I would rather do a better job of network and application security than find out what happens if we don’t.