I'm very skeptical of what Scott Borg, the director of an advisory group to the Department of Homeland Security, is saying about cyber-terrorism. I personally view this as scaremongering to justify the money being spent. He talks about hacking control systems for utilities, and modifications to process control systems to create defective products alongside modifications of quality control systems to prevent them from being noticed. I think that in most cases, even with total access to the hardware, the degree of specialized knowledge required to make such changes undetected make this highly unlikely. Heck, in my own job we have enough trouble keeping systems up when changes are made by the people that actually wrote the applications. Besides, how can I take a guy named "Borg" seriously?
Independent Online Edition > Science & Technology: "Scott Borg, the director and chief economist of the US Cyber Consequences Unit (CCU), a Department of Homeland Security advisory group, believes that attacks on computer networks are poised to escalate to full-scale disasters that could bring down companies and kill people. He warns that intelligence 'chatter' increasingly points to possible criminal or terrorist plans to destroy physical infrastructure, such as power grids. Al-Qa'ida, he stresses, is becoming capable of carrying out such attacks."
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