ABSTRACT
For several days beginning on August 11, 2003, the Internet worm MSBlast spread throughout the network while system administrators worked to eradicate it. Almost immediately, rumors also began to spread that it was the work of terrorist hackers, even perhaps al-Qaeda operatives. Three days later, on August 14, there was another kind of technology failure, a massive electrical-grid blackout that affected the northeastern United States and part of Canada. For a couple of hours after the blackout there were rumors that it, too, had been a terrorist attack against the infrastructure of the U.S. economy. One analyst later suggested that the worm and the blackout may after all have been linked, not by terrorism but by the close interdependence of technologies, because MSBlast may have masked the software failure at FirstEnergy that precipitated the cascading power failure. 1 One headline that August read: “Dueling disasters hit last week, leaving hard-core geeks and Luddites alike to ponder the true meaning of life.” 2
