I absolutely loathe the Olympics, just hate everything about them; so I kind of wasn’t planning to be anywhere near London when they take off anyway. But added to that ever since the Mumbai attacks it just seems to me a time and place worth avoiding. The world’s biggest international sporting event in one of the most open cities on the planet makes for a gigantic target. Given eight years warning how difficult would it be to repeat the performance? Professor Peter Sommer from a little known university across the street from King’s College London appears to share a similar apprehension, see ‘2012 Olympics could face “blended” physical, cyber attack‘. What I particularly about Sommer is that his is a voice of reason in the generally rather febrile cyber-war-espionage-terror-whatever discourse pointing out that on its own cyber (like any other weapon or system) is an annoyance. In combination, however, it could be very important:
There is what’s called a ‘blended attack’, so there is a physical attack, but it’s made easier because someone is disrupting cyber systems at the same time, so that is the sort of scenario that people have got to worry about…
Exactly. That is the principle of combined arms after all–an idea as old as the day one caveman said to another ‘OK, here’s the plan: I’ll stab with pointy stick while you throw the big rock.’ Terrorism today, to play on the words of Antonio Giustozzi, is an unholy amalgam of Koran, Kalashnikov and Smartphone. Unfortunately, it’s probably also true that even without a cyber-monkey wrench being thrown into the mix a coordinated attack of teams attacking in sequence across the city would rapidly stretch the security forces to the max.
