The recently foiled terrorist strike at an oil-processing plant in Saudia Arabia highlights al Qaeda's long-term strategy of attacking the global energy infrastructure.
Experts have long warned that the nation's power, transportation and communications systems are vulnerable to "cyberattacks" that could devastate the economy and cause huge damage to life and property. Now a new government report has concluded that far too little is being done to close these gaps.
The Department of Homeland Security's effort to extend its antiterrorism campaign overseas by enlisting help from importers and foreign ports has been so flawed that the program may have made it easier at times to smuggle unconventional weapons into the United States, Congressional officials say.
President Bush has ordered plans for temporarily disabling the U.S. network of global positioning satellites during a national crisis to prevent terrorists from using the navigational technology.
The UK government has initiated a research program aimed at finding ways to avert catastrophic software failures in critical IT networks like healthcare or banking systems.
Businesses and government agencies must re-examine the growing threat of cyberterrorism to automated computer systems running power grids, dams and other industrial facilities, according to security experts.
Four years ago al Qaeda operatives were taking flying lessons. Today they are honing a new skill: hacking. How much damage could a cyberterrorist do to an electric grid or the Internet? We don't know yet.
A teenage hacker launched an attack on a chatroom user that brought chaos to America's busiest seaport in what police believe to be the first electronic attack to disable a critical part of a country's infrastructure.
The author argues that the western world's reliance on a "weak and dilapidated energy and communications network infrastructures" is a recipe for disaster.
America's critical transportation, power, and communications systems remain quite vulnerable and lack funds to remedy that.