A new way to celebrate

It has been just more than a month since I blogged about the issue of cyberattacks and what our government is doing about them. An Associated Press article reports that a new and different way to celebrate the July 4th holiday is by taking down US government web sites. There was apparently a widespread and significant denial of service attack that rendered several web sites unavailable for a few days.

The cynic in me wonders if this was an illustration of the severity of the problem that was orchestrated to obtain additional funding and visibility for the new government initiative to fight cyber crime. Probably not. A more realistic explanation is an attempt to take these same folks down a notch or two and illustrate the fine job that they're not doing.

I won't belabor the point, but consider how this might have affected you if these had not been obscure government web sites, but instead the one that runs your local ATM or that distributes your electricity. Few notice when the US Treasury website or the Department of Transportion go dark, but the vulnerability of the US power grid to cyberattack is a bit more significant.