Strategic Assessment

Recent wide-spread publicity in the Israeli and international media regarding a young Israeli computer hacker’s penetration of classified Pentagon computer systems has raised public awareness of crime and terrorism in Cyberspace and the Internet. The youngster, Ehud Tennenbaum, managed to dismay computer security experts worldwide and to mobilize the police and justice authorities both in Israel and the United States, who tried to contain the alleged damages he did. In his defense, Tennenbaum claimed that he simply wanted to send an ‘elegant’ message to the power figures in the Pentagon by breaking through their computer defenses. Thus, the phenomenon of a modern day Robin Hood, or Cyberspace-delinquent — Tennenbaum’s case being the most recent in a long list of youths penetrating government, economic and military systems — illustrates the extreme vulnerability of computer-driven systems. Tennenbaum’s prank was a powerful illustration of the establishment’s helplessness in face of such attacks. The degree to which our lives depend on computers and other information-reliant infrastructures, and the apparent ease with which these critical infrastructures can be sabotaged or paralyzed, provide yet another warning of one of the main hazards of the ‘Information Age.’