(By North Korea?)
The predecessor to the internet was created with the intention of decentralizing critical US communication infrastructure, so that, in the case of a nuclear war or other significant disaster that may collapse traditional communication methods, the United States military and government would continue to be able to communicate.
While the United States government is still a major user of the internet, the US economy is now completely reliant on it. While the nature of the internet is such where it would be difficult to completely collapse, a well-executed attack could slow down sections of it into near uselessness.
This is called a denial of service attack, which is generally launched against specific websites, in order to flood them with so much traffic that they are unable to function normally and either crash or slow to a crawl.
In an attack linked with the one in South Korea, 14 major Web sites in the United States — including those of the White House, the State Department and the New York Stock Exchange — came under similar attacks, according to anti-cyberterrorism police officers in Seoul.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/technology/09cyber.html?ref=global-home
The US military is struggling to restructure their mission to include not just defending the United States from air, land, and sea attacks, but also to buttress and secure our cyber-“borders”.
The reality is disheartening. We live in a world that is increasingly reliant on technology, technology that is grounded in sometimes classic, sometimes nascent scientific principles. Unfortunately, our increasing reliance on technology (and the science behind it) is not correlated with an increasing understanding of those principles among the general public. This is a dangerous trend.
I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time ... when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstitions and darkness. (Sagan, 1995, p. 25)
Further Reading:
References:
Sagan, C. (1995). The demon-haunted world : science as a candle in the dark (1st ed.). New York: Random House.
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