A man is sitting in his Dublin office when all the lights go out suddenly. Switching on the radio, he hears the ESB is reporting an unexpected outage when the radio station stops broadcasting. Lifting the mobile phone to call home and see if everything's okay, he finds there is no signal . . .
It's 3 p.m. in Cairo. You've heard that the attack on Europe's power networks succeeded. Ominously, Sky News just reported that British special forces have taken a bunker in Afghanistan belonging to your longtime associate, Osama bin Laden. You decide it's time to move. Quickly you head to the local cybercafe to access your numbered, supposedly anonymous Swiss bank account to move some money to a local bank so you can get some cash and skip the country, moving on to another safe place with a new identity.
Hold on, what's this? All your cash is gone. But you don't yet know the worst. Israeli intelligence agents have just locked on to your location using a computer trace to the cybercafe's internet protocol address.
You remember e-commerce, e-tailing, e-government? Okay. Welcome to the new art of warfare: e-war.
Security experts in the US and Europe expect this new warfare will feature prominently in the battle with terrorism following the September 11th attacks on New York and Washington.
You think all this sounds like a cheesy James Bond film or Tom Clancy novel? Tell that to the hundreds of people around former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, who woke up one morning in 1999 to find all of their accounts empty.
"The US led a co-ordinated attack on the financial web of Milosevic in an under-reported campaign. Anyone who stood with the Yugoslav leader was bankrupted - families, relations, business associates. More than 700 Yugoslavs in all," said US congressman Mr Mark Kirk, from Illinois. Before his election, Mr Kirk served as a military intelligence officer in the Kosovo campaign.
Mr Kirk added: "Anyone targeted would suddenly look in their bank accounts in Switzerland or the Bahamas and find the money was gone."
That, apparently, is only one aspect of what the terrorists and their backers face from the emerging arsenal of electronic weapons and tactics at the disposal of the US and its allies.
On May 15th, 1999, US B-2 Stealth bombers were on their way to a factory and a power plant in Eastern Serbia. In what was dubbed "Operation Matrix", US and British e-war specialists used mobile phone text messages, e-mails and faxes to warn the plant owners of the attack.
The warnings had nothing to do with limiting casualties, nor were the targets of great military value. Rather, the operation carried the same message to the factory owners as the raids on bank accounts: prevail upon the Yugoslav leader to withdraw his forces from Kosovo or face further attacks on your sources of income.
Sources close to the US intelligence community indicate that similar tactics are being considered against Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida network and its backers. This follows the announcement last week that the US was moving to freeze or seize assets of terrorists in the US and demanding that all foreign banks do the same.
Given that some people who trained with bin Laden are reputed to still be in the Republic, they may find themselves the target of similar tactics.
While Western intelligence agencies are working on ways to use various electronic means to disrupt terrorists' networks of communications and financing, much of the work around e-war has focused on defending corporate and government networks from outside attack. Our daily lives are now dependent upon computer networks for even the most basic services. Dependence necessarily means vulnerability.
Until now, the focus has been on securing corporate networks and financial transactions against attack from criminals and hackers. Multimillion dollar Irish businesses such as Baltimore and Trintech grew around just this threat.
When thinking about cyberterrorism, what might come to mind is the thief or prankster who last year broke into the computers of Eircom's internet service provider and stole subscriber data. The next day, Eircom changed all of its subscriber passwords without notice. A nuisance, surely, but not a life-or-death issue.
For a few years, defence and intelligence officials have been concerned with far more organised attacks designed to disrupt networks that control utilities, transportation, banks and telecommunications on a massive scale. Think this is unlikely? Mr Amit Yoran, formerly a director at the US Department of Defense Computer Emergency Response Team says: "It's a credible threat right now."
Mr Yoran is chief executive of Riptech, a US company that employs "ethical hackers" to test vulnerability of networks, including those of utility companies. He says his teams have had success in disrupting utilities' power networks, in Europe particularly.
"A terrorist could change the way power is distributed and cause physical damage to infrastructure, with pretty nasty consequences."
Worse still, according to Mr Yoran, is that European networks are more vulnerable than their US counterparts. "Europeans don't seem to be aware that protecting their systems requires more sophisticated defences than a firewall."
