Imagine waking up tomorrow morning to discover that your bank's website is inaccessible. Your credit card no longer works. Gas stations cannot process payments. Grocery stores are accepting cash only, while others have closed entirely because their computerized systems are down.
Now imagine that the problem isn't limited to your community or even your country. Major financial institutions around the world are experiencing similar disruptions, and nobody knows how long they will last.
For most Americans, such a scenario sounds like something out of a Hollywood disaster movie. But for the cybersecurity professionals who spend their days defending the digital infrastructure upon which modern civilization depends, the threat is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
And the latest wave of cyberattacks raises an unsettling question: Could the growing vulnerability of our digital world eventually create the conditions for a global financial system in which buying and selling are tightly controlled?
