Last year, a company called Telvent, which monitors pipelines, discovered that Chinese hackers had broken into its computer systems. Today, Stuart Staniford alerts me to this remarkable paragraph in a New York Times story about the incident:
At a moment when corporate America is caught between what it sees as two different nightmares — preventing a crippling attack that brings down America’s most critical systems, and preventing Congress from mandating that the private sector spend billions of dollars protecting against that risk — the Telvent experience resonates as a study in ambiguity.
I guess that’s the kind of thing that really keeps American CEOs up at night. Which is more apocalyptic: the prospect of Chinese hackers destroying their infrastructure, or the prospect of a government regulation that tries to stop Chinese hackers from destroying their infrastructure? Decisions, decisions…..
