[El Gato]

This idiot was right about the service economy, but he was missing what makes it all possible. Communications. You wanna do some real damage to moral and the economy. Go after communications, TV/RAdio/Phone/ATM/INTERNET. One of our strengths is the ability to communicate and organize quickly. Like in any war, cut the comm and you cause disarray.

The internet is a distributed network. It was originally designed to survive a nuclear war. It won't be all that easy to take out, even if one goes for a "soft" rather than "hard" kill. I think it was tried a couple of weeks ago, and the "attack" was barely noticible to the average user, if it was noticiable at all.

[eno_]

Exactly. One reason it was a no-brainer to predict that basically nothing would happen due to teh Y2K bug was that our systems are too heterogenous for a single attack to take out everything. I'm sure that a nation with the resources, like China, might be looking for ways to mount a successful multiple attack based on security exploits and software viruses, but that is much less likely to succeed than the U.S. approach: Obliterate the power plants, substations, pumping stations, rail yards, airports, telephone exchanges, and key network nodes with bombs.