Abstract

It begins as a regular day in March of 1997, but by 9:00 a.m. all communications are down at the Worcester Airport in Massachusetts. Telephone service at the airport and its fire department are cut off without warning. Six hours later all telephone service has been disabled in the entire surrounding area. Emergency services are jeopardized as the city's residents have lost the means to make calls for help, putting the health and safety of the public at risk. The airplanes have lost the means to coordinate landings and takeoffs at the airport, creating delays across the nation. In the span of a few hours, a juvenile computer hacker has single-handedly disrupted several sectors of the nation's critical infrastructure using only his personal computer as an aid. This is just one of the thousands of instances in the past decade in which a cyber security breach has jeopardized the critical infrastructure of this nation.