Even authorised users require specialist knowledge.”A simulation in 2002 by the US Naval War College concluded that an “electronic Pearl Harbor” attack on America’s infrastructure would certainly cause serious disruption. But to pull it off would require five years of preparation and a $200m budget. As US computer security guru Bruce Schneier says: “If they want to attack, they will do it with bombs like they always have.”But Richard Clarke, a former cyber-security expert in the Bush administration, says this is complacent. They tend to be obscure, old-fashioned systems that are incompatible with internet technology anyhow. Control systems are usually kept entirely separate from other systems, for good reason. “But just because customers pay their bills online, it doesn’t follow that critical control systems are vulnerable to attack.

Computer consultants issued dire warnings of the danger of an information technology breakdown that could paralyse nations on New Year’s Day 2000. When the clock struck midnight, however, few problems were reported There is scepticism that the bug was ever a threat. As far as Standage is concerned, those in the cyber-security industry – be they vendors boosting sales, academics chasing grants or politicians looking for bigger budgets – always have a “built-in incentive to overstate the risks”.But what of the Scada systems; surely they are highly vulnerable? “It is true that utility companies and other operators of critical infrastructure are increasingly connected to the internet,” Standage concedes. “Then, as now, the alarm was sounded by technology vendors and consultants, who stood to gain from scaremongering.”Almost £400m was spent by the Government alone on preparations for the Millennium bug.

“The potential to wreak havoc and cause disruption to people, governments and global systems has increased as the world becomes more globalised,” he said. “The economic loss caused by a cyber attack can be truly severe; for example, a nationwide blackout, collapse of trading systems or the crippling of a central bank’s cheque clearing system.”While the case for cyber attack appears persuasive, some believe that much of it is hype. “It’s difficult to avoid comparisons with the Millennium bug and the predictions of widespread computer chaos arising from the change of date to the year 2000,” says Tom Standage, technology editor at The Economist magazine. Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said the facility – to be located at the technology hub of Cyberjaya outside Kuala Lumpur – would be called the International Multilateral Partnership against Cyber-Terrorism, or Impact, and would be funded by a combination of government revenue and the private sector.Badawi said the threat of cyber-terrorism was too serious for governments to ignore.

This month, the Malaysian government announced plans to establish a centre to fight cyber-terrorism, which will provide an emergency response to hi-tech attacks around the globe. Nick Robson, a partner at JLT Risk Solutions, says: “A cyber attack on, say, the power industry would cause communications operations to close down for a period of time, expose customers to loss of service, increase liability exposure and ultimately damage reputation for service delivery.”It isn’t just Western nations that fear a digital meltdown. They believe that an online attack would undermine public confidence in vital industries, especially utilities. But intelligence reports in the last year or so make for worrying reading. An assessment by the British security service MI5 stated that “Britain is four meals away from anarchy”. And officials admit their greatest fears about electronic attacks focus on the more exposed networks that make up the “critical national infrastructure” – the systems Borg is concerned about.US agencies are concerned that terrorists could combine electronic and physical attacks to devastating effect, such as disrupting emergency services at the same time as mounting a bomb attack.Risk management analysts, equally edgy, are focusing on the financial impact on businesses and economies. “People would stop buying cars.” A few such attacks, run simultaneously, would send economies crashing Populations would be in turmoil.

At the click of a mouse, the terrorists would have won.Is Borg justified in his fears? All this sounds like a plot from a thriller; it’s hard to take it seriously. Yet it might take months before someone figured out what was going on.” The result, he says, would be panic, people afraid to visit hospitals and health services facing huge lawsuits.Deadly scenarios could occur in industry, too. Online outlaws might change key specifications at a car factory, Borg says, causing a car to “burst into flames after it had been driven for a certain number of weeks”. Apart from people being injured or killed, the car maker would collapse. “Imagine, say, a life-saving drug being produced and distributed with the wrong level of active ingredients. This could gradually result in large numbers of deaths or disabilities.