"There's a lot of inhibition over doing it," said Harvey M. Sapolsky, an MIT professor who hosted the Jan. 22 session. "A lot of institutions and people are worried about becoming subject to the same kinds of attack in reverse." [Washington Post] Sounds like the doctrine of mutually-assured destruction to me - the word "nuclear" keeps coming up in the discussion.

Cyber-sleuths mi2g have thoughts on the matter:

The mi2g Intelligence Unit feels that this development is a timely initiative and some aspects of it are totally in line with previous predictions that mi2g has made such as in the November 11, 2002 News Release. See attached. Attached please find comments from DK Matai, Chairman and CEO of mi2g:

"The asymmetric risk of Cyber Warfare is loaded against the economically prosperous and densely networked Western countries. Any state sponsoring the use of Cyber Warfare will have to look closely at retaliation and threats to its digitally connected government and business targets. When cyber attack blended with physical attack is used to disrupt or damage critical national infrastructure, there are counter-attacks which quickly follow suit.

Based on mi2g's experience during the NATO-Serbia war in 1999, the blended attacks on Serbia's telephone and power utilities were followed by counter-attacks on NATO Command and the US DoD's eMail and internet servers. Targeted attacks on over 100 businesses in NATO member countries took place by hackers sympathetic to Serbia that were traced back to Russia and Eastern Europe. Post the accidential bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, a huge spike of attacks originated from Hong Kong, Taiwan and China on US government, academic and business targets.

In the case of the looming attack on Iraq, the concern in blending Cyber Warfare techniques would be the likely impact felt by the US, UK, Canada and Australia in particular from counter-cyber-attack which would inevitably follow suit from countries already known to originate significant hacker attacks against the West such as Morocco, Egypt, Eastern European and Central Asian countries, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Pakistan and Indonesia."