As soon as the United States attacked the three nuclear sites in Iran, anxious minds began to anticipate where and how the Iranians might try to strike back. For most people, that probably conjured images of an attack on a physical site, like a bomb planted on a train; however, a few people think that an outside-of-the-box cyber-attack could inflict even greater damage to America. Kevin Cirilli is a futurist and founder of the “Meet the Future” website. He appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to say that Iran may strike back at America’ soft underbelly, and we need to be ready for it.
Cirilli told host Larry Mendte that Iranian cyber attackers took credit for a brief slowdown of President Trump’s Truth Social website in the hours after the attacks on Iran. “These ‘hacktivists’, these hackers behind keyboards, they’re really just showing brute force by doing what’s known in the intelligence community as DDOS attacks- denial of services attacks. All that means is that they’re clogging the system, jamming the servers, taking popular websites off-line for a couple of hours… That said, I’m based in Washington D.C., and what concerns the intelligence community and the military community is that, Lord forbid, there would ever be a cyber-9/11.”
Cirilli says we need to protect cyberspace in much the same way that we protect real estate or physical property against threats. “As a society, we need to be thinking of protecting the digital domain, the digital frontier, as if it’s a piece of land, because as we continue to advance in technology… a cyber-attack can keep pace with our ability to implement innovation.”
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