A Middle East state decides the time is ripe for a power grab in the Persian Gulf and directs its threat to an oil-rich neighbor that the United States is pledged to protect. The aggressors elect not to challenge America in a head-on military confrontation. Instead they prepare a more insidious assault. In the United States and abroad among U.S. allies, a pattern of computer mayhem begins to emerge in a cascading sequence of events. Actually, the war has already begun but no one in the United States yet realizes it; logic bombs and computer viruses don't make much noise.

A three-hour power blackout in a Middle Eastern city has no reasonable explanation, misrouted freight and passenger trains collide, killing and injuring many passengers; malfunctions of computerized flow-control mechanisms trigger oil refinery explosions and fires, electronic "sniffers" sabotage the global financial system by disrupting international fund-transfer networks, causing stocks to plunge on the New York and London exchanges. Television stations in the Middle East lose control of their programming and a misinformation campaign of unknown orchestration sows widesprea

Computing professionals all over the world need to be aware of possible areas of weakness to such terrorism, in order to better protect their computer systems and possibly help put an end to terrorist activity. An important part of any profession is promoting the good name of that profession, but cyber-terrorist continue to give the computing profession a bad reputation. Thus, it is important for computing professionals to understand cyber-terrorism for the benefit of themselves, their profession, and society as a whole.

· A CyberTerrorist will attack the next generation of air traffic control systems, and collide two large civilian aircraft. This is a realistic scenario, since the CyberTerrorist will also crack the aircraft's in-cockpit sensors. Much of the same can be done to the rail lines.

· Electric and natural gas utilities

In the networked world of today, the effects of such physical attacks could spread far beyond the radius of a bomb blast. New technological innovations have opened up a Pandora's Box of exploitable vulnerabilities.

2. Through electronic jamming devices;

If a particular system is easily infiltrated and is connected to other networks of a particular terrorist's interests, the terrorist will use the most weakly defended pathway for access to the targeted system. Then the terrorist can infiltrate other networks, install various weapons that may assist future physical or cyber attacks.

Another example of a virus that could have strategic implications is an electronic virus, created by Larry Wood, appropriately named Blitzkrieg. Allegedly, the virus is an undetectable and unstoppable cyber weapon that is the equivalent of the deadly human Ebola virus. Blitzkrieg is designed using a set of microbe-mimicking algorithms based on Wood's quantum physics and chaos theory research. These algorithms can be used as an offensive weapon to destroy the attacker's own computer or can be injected into another system to crash every piece of equipment on the network, including those that are turned off. According to Larry Wood, "There is no way you can defend against something like this".

To describe such a person, we must define a new term, Cyber-terrorist.

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 4477
Approximate Pages = 18 (250 words per page double spaced)