For the last year or so, business managers have been pounded
with the rallying cry to protect their data and controls from
possible cyber crime. Now, several Information Technology
experts are asking the question: Has the threat of
cyberterrorism been overstated? At the recent CeBIT show, a
panel of IT experts concluded that it has. The general consensus
was that a bomb would strike more terror into a people or
country than a temporary shutdown of the Internet. The Internet
is great for communication, and terrorists are probably using it
for such purposes. But the idea that a shutdown of the Internet
would frighten people, in the U.S. for example, into widespread
panic has less credibility, said the experts. According to the
panel, which included executives from software security vendors
and representatives from NATO, most critical systems don’t run
on the Internet. They run on secure networks, making it far less
likely that terrorist hackers would get in. (If you’re like most
businesses, you too have an inde