There is an under-reported story that the mainstream media has largely ignored. In a nutshell, the computers in the White House were attacked by the Russians which caused a shutdown for over a week. This is big news but Official Washington isn’t saying much about it because it would cast the Obama Administration in a bad light. However, this event has bigger implications than any damage sustained by an increasingly marginalized, lame-duck President.

Back in World War Two, the United States launched the Doolittle Raid against Japan. For those who don’t know about this event, sixteen Army B-25 bombers took off from the USS Hornet about 800 miles from Japan. They bombed targets primarily around Tokyo then headed towards mainland China on a one-way mission. The damage from the raids was insignificant, but the shock waves it sent through the Imperial War Cabinet were significant. The Japanese military and civilian leadership knew that they were not safe from attack and had to start diverting resources to securing the Home Islands. This raid was a prelude to much more devastating ones launched by B-29s in the fall of 1944, which culminated in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I don’t know if I would call this event “Doolitov’s Raid” but it could be a portend of future attacks.

Think about it this way, if a foreign country can successfully compromise the computers for the White House, what other systems and organizations can it take down? Imagine if a hostile power or even a group of malicious hackers wanted to cause real damage by hitting the electrical grid or air traffic control systems. I work in the banking sector and if a “too big to fail” institution was compromised, it could cause massive financial problems and cost huge sums to remediate. The point is, information systems are not totally secure if they are connected to any other network node. Just like Imperial Japan, the United States is not immune from attack, except in this case the attacker used bytes instead of bombs to cause havoc.

Plan accordingly…