So we've heard a lot of talk about "cyber warfare" and "cyber terrorism". Bullshit, right?

Well, I used to think so. Then I interviewed Richard A. Clarke.

Some of you may have seen this piece, which ran in the Sydney Morning Herald and Age newspapers. Based on a phone interview with Clarke, the piece looks at the role technology plays in national defence.

Even if we disregard the affect of a cyber attack on Australia's war fighting capability (do we even have one?), the impact of a significant attack on our network infrastructure, physical or virtual, could cause some serious problems for our country.

Clarke estimates we have around six major pipes coming into Australia. If they were severed, think of the impact that would have on our economy. Private networks are more or less a thing of the past. Transaction based systems would cease operating, and everyone would hit the phones. Oops, they're not designed for that sort of capacity, so they'd drop as well. The resulting chaos would have the potential to plunge Australia into recession.

Al Qaeda and friends are thinking along these lines, too. Scotland Yard claims to have recently foiled an attack on a major Internet hub in Britain. A similar attack, due to take place days after the 9-11 attacks on the US, was also foiled.

With every day that passes, the consequences of such an attack become more dire.

The scary thing is, there's not really a lot we can do about it. We can increase physical security around beach head routers, but that wouldn't stop someone with the right gear taking out submarine cables with some under water explosives.

But it's the SCADA stuff that's really frightening. As Clarke himself says, there's no reason he should be able to hack his way through to an electricity control system from the Internet. Yet that's a plausible scenario. In Australia, SCADA control systems are being meshed into IP networks. Sure, there's some care taken when they're deployed, but the fact that there is a path -- albeit a restricted path -- to these systems from the Internet should give us pause.

Is a cyber attack from terrorists less likely than a physical attack like a bombing? Probably. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be taking some steps to bolster our redundancy and eradicate SCADA-Internet connections.

The Clarke interview is available in my podcast here, although the server's getting hammered with downloads at the moment so it'll be a bit slow.