How often do threats like the one reported in Computerworld US last week come through?
You can almost pick up any paper and find word of new attacks, so they’re fairly persistent. They come and they go and I guess each one’s got to be looked at on its merits. I do wonder whether at this stage these [terrorist] groups do have any more competence than your average spotty hacker. Teenagers have done some serious things with denial of service attacks, haven’t they? Yes. And even then there are levels. With your script kiddies you can go onto the Internet and get into hacker sites and download tools and with not much more knowledge than it takes to turn the computer on, you can become a jacker. There’s that level, then there are some very sophisticated ones – I guess it’s the distributed denial of service attack that’s one of the biggest threats at the moment. We’ve seen those – and they generally didn’t last longer than 24 hours and western civilisation didn’t come tumbling down, did it? No it didn’t – which says a fair bit for the resilience of the Net. There are still acti
