The British government is the target of 1,000 malicious e-mail attacks a month, said Iain Lobban, serving director of Government Communications Headquarters, on October 12. Britain’s new National Security Strategy (nss), unveiled on October 18, lists cyberattacks as a “tier one” threat, alongside international terrorism, natural hazards such as a flu pandemic and an international military crisis.

“Tier one” events are risks that the National Security Council gives high priority to.

Ahead of the publication of the nss,Sir Malcolm Rifkind, chairman of Britain’s Intelligence and Security Committee, warned that cyberattacks could cause “very massive problems.”

“It’s not people hacking into private citizens’ computers,” he told bbc’s Radio 4. “What we’re talking about is terrorists being able to actually use cyber methods, for example, to interrupt the National Grid to prevent proper instructions going to power stations, which are under computer control.

“I was in the United States a few months ago and a very senior intelligence figure said to me that cyberattacks, he feared, were going to be the United States’ next Pearl Harbor. That’s the kind of severity that could happen if we don’t get it right.”

Charles Heyman, editor of the annual publication The Armed Forces of the United Kingdom, also gave a stark warning about cyberattacks:

A major cyberattack could happen to us at any time. It’s by far the most serious threat that we face. We can deal with natural disasters … but we are now so wedded to the Internet, to the wired-up community, that that is where we are really vulnerable.A cyber Pearl Harbor is something that can bring down a modern state almost immediately before it can get its defenses mobilized.An attack on Britain would almost certainly result in the complete shutdown of mobile phones and a complete shutdown of television and radio networks.

Earlier this year, nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen warned that nato headquarters are attacked over 100 times a day. “It’s no exaggeration to say that cyberattacks have become a new form of permanent, low-level warfare,” he said.

In September, the Wall Street Journal quoted an anonymous source familiar with U.S. assessments of nato’s systems as saying that “the Chinese totally owned” nato’s security systems.

The Telegraph’s executive foreign editor Con Coughlin painted a dramatic picture of the havoc a cyberattack could cause:

The year is 2025, and the Royal Navy has just dispatched one of its new, state-of-the-art aircraft carriers to the Pacific Ocean, as a bitter trade dispute with China threatens to spill over into open conflict. Equipped with a full complement of Joint Strike Fighter warplanes, and escorted by a battle group of heavily armed destroyers and frigates, the carrier has been sent to demonstrate to Beijing that Britain is determined to protect international shipping lanes.Then, before a shot is fired in anger, the aircraft carrier and all the other ships are suddenly hit by a massive power failure. The engines and the computer systems shut down, and the fleet’s powerful array of weaponry is rendered inoperable.At a stroke, the British battle group has been neutralized by teams of highly skilled computer hackers assigned to the People’s Liberation Army (pla), which have placed a computer worm in the fleet’s operating systems.At the same time, Chinese cyberwarriors launch a “clickskrieg” against mainland Britain. At the press of a mouse button, power stations, water firms, air traffic control and all government and financial systems are shut down. In the space of a few minutes, the entire nation has been paralyzed.

Despite recent attempts by the U.S. and Britain to upgrade their cyber defense systems, their complete dependence on technology leaves them vulnerable to attack. For more information on this danger, see our article “America’s Achilles’ Heel.”