In case you hadn?t noticed, there is a new Cold War, and in many respects, it?s a far greater threat than the saber rattling that characterized the face-off between the United States and former Soviet Union a generation ago.

This new Cold War is being fought with computers, and there was a heated skirmish over the Fourth of July weekend.

The battle was focused in Washington and South Korea. The weapons of mass destruction were computers wielded by criminals in some undisclosed location, hacking into what government officials believed were secure networks.

This is a mostly covert war, in part because cyber experts don?t want to alert potential hackers about how easy it can be to, literally, disrupt a government.

Hackers invaded networks at the U.S. Treasury and Transportation departments, Secret Service and Federal Trade Commission last Saturday.

Some of the systems violated are the ones that are supposed to protect these agencies from being hacked 8 not unlike troops involved in a fire fight with insurgents, only to discover the enemy has all your radio frequency codes, and a magic device to blunt the force of your bullets.

Federal officials insist they are staying ahead of the attackers, and that this nation?s security is not at significant risk.

Not so in the South Korea attacks. Web sites used by South Korea?s major government departments and banks were essentially paralyzed by the coordinated weekend attack.

It doesn?t take a great suspension of the imagination to envision an attack of this kind freezing crucial government and military operations, traveling around the globe at the speed of light.

A U.S. Internet security firm?s 2007 study of cyber warfare concluded that at least 120 countries are actively developing ways to use the Internet as a weapon 8 including, presumably, the United States. And the unfortunate reality is that not all of those countries will use their knowledge for the benefit of mankind.

Most power transmission systems are operated by computers, as are the networks employed by financial institutions, which means this nation?s and most other nations? power and money supply are vulnerable to cyberwar.

And you thought the Cold War was dead.

July 9, 2009