Maybe not so uh-oh. Isn't the Net a two-way street? Can't we "study" all those systems in Saudi, Paki, and Axis of Evil countries pretty easily? What do you want to bet we already have?
A couple of years ago, World Net Daily reported on a group of hackers, Hong Kong Blonds, who had hacked into Beijing's computers and loused up the Red Army in some pretty interesting and effective ways. So it's being done. Author of articles on Hong Kong Blonds was Anthhony lo Biado (Portuguese name), if you want to look them up.
One little cyber attack, and the USA could retaliate in kind, blowing several nasty little countries off the map altogether. (If they're sophisticated enough to have vital services run by computers.)
A computer seized at an al Qaeda office contained models of a dam, made with structural architecture and engineering software, that enabled the planners to simulate its catastrophic failure. Bush administration officials, who discussed the find, declined to say whether they had identified a specific dam as a target.
The FBI reported that the computer had been running Microstran, an advanced tool for analyzing steel and concrete structures; Autocad 2000, which manipulates technical drawings in two or three dimensions; and software "used to identify and classify soils," which would assist in predicting the course of a wall of water surging downstream.
To destroy a dam physically would require "tons of explosives," Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff said a year ago. To breach it from cyberspace is not out of the question. In 1998, a 12-year-old hacker, exploring on a lark, broke into the computer system that runs Arizona's Roosevelt Dam. He did not know or care, but federal authorities said he had complete command of the SCADA system controlling the dam's massive floodgates.
Roosevelt Dam holds back as much as 1.5 million acre-feet of water, or 489 trillion gallons. That volume could theoretically cover the city of Phoenix, down river, to a height of five feet. In practice, that could not happen. Before the water reached the Arizona capital, the rampant Salt River would spend most of itself in a flood plain encompassing the cities of Mesa and Tempe -- with a combined population of nearly a million.