I was going to ask the second part of your second question. The answer is, that by the time anyone knew a "cyber 9/11" was happening, the President himself coul

I was going to ask the second part of your second question. The answer is, that by the time anyone knew a "cyber 9/11" was happening, the President himself could do nothing to stop it. Further, this sort of security theater (or is it Security Burlesque?) doesn't really do anyone much good. It's far better to work toward policy and protocol that improves security a little bit across the board, rather than nit-pick little specific threats. For instance, throwing a lot of time and money at locking down SCADA at nuclear power plants isn't going to help as much as making sure there's a sane firewall review policy in place. The answers to #1 would probably be: a. Infiltration of networks belonging to Federal Government, Military, and private defense organizations. Maybe other massive-scale breaches of smaller government entities, hospitals, etc. - Communications shutdowns, leakage or destruction of data, etc. It's really hard to tell. I don't believe in a "Live Free or Die Hard" movie-plot "Firesale" scale of carnage, though. b. If you look at Operation Aurora, though, and consider the fact that a dedicated team of skilled attackers could potentially sit in wait, persisting without causing much trouble, over long periods of time... you see where it could go. c. Folks who don't like the U.S. but have strong technical skills. As you can imagine, that's not exactly a TINY group of people. They'd also need someone or a group of people who are good at coordinating things.