Fake news from Ted Koppel

It's always sad to see people let themselves down and I was saddened to see Ted Koppel pushing his new book "Lights Out" based on the premise of a terrorist attack on US infrastructure.

" The more I looked into it, the more I came to the conclusion that the federal and state governments have done little or nothing to prepare for anything other than the natural disasters we experience every year and that a cyberattack would potentially be far, far worse." - Ted Koppel 

Now apart from being the plot to that terrible terrible terrible stinker that was Die Hard V it is also the cry of the fear-monger and particularly the older fear-monger.

Basically Koppel's cry can be translated as

"Oh my! things are not what they were when I was a lad, we had a policeman on every street and we were safe in our beds but now, the kids, with their computers and internet, they are putting us all at risk  Things are strange and different and you all should be afraid!"

Computer linked infrastructure is even older than the internet as we know it and computers have been running and managing it since before I was born.  And yet can Ted point out one single serious cyber-attack in that time?

He can not.  Can you?  I doubt it.

But in his book he wants you to fear such an event, to invest money in preventing such an event.

But the truth is money and effort and time is and always has been spent in keeping infrastructure safe always has and always will.

Ted needs to avoid the doom-mongering and stop watching "War Games" on VHS.  He will sleep better and so will we.