Please. "Hell online" is going to be trivial compared to the thousands who will die in the first hours of the conventional artillery shelling of Seoul. Let's not pretend that some leaked emails are in any way going to be as bad as that.
And frankly, hacking into Sony is not that hard to do.
I honestly don't know what's worse. Shelling Seoul, which will be bad don't get me wrong, or killing the power grid and water systems of entire countries. The latter could utterly cripple logistical systems and lead to a total melt-down of society if there was enough panic brewing. If there's shelling you can evacuate the city, you can head out of range of the guns. There's nowhere to hide from electronic warfare if your entire society depends on power, fuel and computers.
This isn't about leaked emails or advance copies of movies, it's about attacking and permanently damaging large portions of infrastructure. If you can fiddle with a power plant you can destroy generators, transformers, and other extremely expensive equipment that could months to source, fabricate, transport and replace under ideal conditions. They don't have a warehouse full of spare turbines just sitting around.
Stuxnet showed what can happen if you pin-point target a particular system. If you broaden the scope of your targets, if you don't care about collateral damage, the stakes are very, very high.
Hacking into Sony wasn't hard and I have a sneaking suspicion that most infrastructure control systems are as bad or worse.
The black-out in eastern North America in 2003 shows how suddenly things can change if the grid goes down. That only lasted a day and yet the economic destruction was significant. Imagine if not only were the power plants offline, but they were crippled in such a way they couldn't come back without serious repairs. That is a possibility here. Months without power, without water.
Just ask yourself which would be worse for you, say, a week or even a month without power or a rain of explosives randomly demolishing buildings in your city.
We can get stuff working one way or the other without networked computers but there is no reasoning with shells.
There's been a lot of civilian casualties in Syria where large cities like Aleppo have been bombed to hell and back, but millions of people made it out of there alive.
It's not a great situation to be in, but many were able to flee to better places. If the entire grid is down there are no better places.
Shelling a major metropolitan area will kill thousands of people within hours. The power grid going down doesn't typically kill very many people unless it is down for a long time.
It won't be MY city they are shelling, they cannot reach my city with their guns. Even if they could we are low down on the list of targets. However they can reach my city in a broad bring down all water systems attack. I suspect there are only a couple vendors of water control systems so if there is a hold in one vendor's water control system they will attack everyone at once. Tiny towns with < 500 people will be hit, and I don't know if my town is one or not. (actually tiny towns are probably easier to target, large cities probably have a mix of systems so they are more likely to get by with a general everyone conserve water message, whiel the small towns are down completely.
Many municipalities have sold off large chunks of their infrastructure to private companies that are always more concermed with profit than expenses like "security".
It stands to reason that the smaller towns will be hit the hardest since they're the least prepared for electronic warfare. Their IT department is going to be the same guy that tests the water and removes dead animals from the reservoir.
Hospital generators will run dry within days, and then you'll be losing thousands of people who are dependent on life-support equipment, medication that needs refrigeration, or those that are in urgent need of surgery.
You have about 48 hours until things start to get really ugly. See also: Hurricane Katrina. They were able to minimize casualties by moving people to other hospitals that had power. Imagine if there weren't any.
Ok. When someone actually has some concrete information that would indicate North Korea has the capability to "attack and permanently damage large portions of infrastructure", anything equivalent to Stuxnet, or an intelligence service capable of delivering such threats to critical infrastructure, I'll worry about that then.
I just think their conventional military, their continually improving nuclear program, and their ballistic missile technology are a lot more real and a lot more dangerous than the cyber-pocaylpse people have been trying to scare everyone with since the nineties.
Didn't that single event have far reaching effects on American and worldwide culture? In this case it ended up being positive in my opinion(helping develop hip hop and rap through stolen DJ equipment[1]), but there's no guarantee that a similar event would also be positive. That is especially the case if an actor is trying to cause as many problems as possible.
It wasn't a malicious event, nor was the 2003 sequel. They were able to get the grid back online bit by bit by coordinating between power generation companies using other infrastructure.
Imagine if not only is the grid down, but the phones are down, the water's down, and air travel is grounded because the control towers operators have been shut out of their systems.
Plus, as you're trying to restore the systems with what limited communications you have someone is actively trying to prevent you from doing your job, or there's enough booby-traps in the system that you basically need to re-install everything from scratch and reconfigure everything.
This also presumes no critical equipment was damaged in the attacks, which it probably will be. North Korea would want to wreck as much of everything as they possibly can if they're fearing a regime-ending invasion.
Last week Maersk was shutdown worldwide for 24 hours, how long do you think major cities can keep going without that cargo coming in? How long can the keep going if the water or electricity supply was compromised?
As terrible as a shooting war in Korea would be, it's still a lot better than a potential full scale cyber war.
People worked their asses off to avoid Y2K, everything needed to be tested, patched, and tested again.
Unfortunately we have not been as vigilant about security. We're barely able to handle script kiddies armed with a bot army of webcams. We're completely unprepared for when a nation-state actor declares electronic war.
You're right that as we get more and more automation going on our exposure surface grows dramatically.
The casualties will, and should, stun people. The Korean War, 1950-1953, total civilians killed/wounded: 2.5 million (wikipedia), and cost $341 billion in 2011 dollars (Congressional Research Service).
And then there will be a massive refugee problem on both sides.
So long as the planet of the population keeps going up and the population density of cities increases the chance of multiple millions of people being killed in a single military exchange keeps escalating.
I'd like to think we can keep a lid on things and work it out in a more civil manner, economically it makes more sense, but you know, dictators don't really care about economics as much as they do ego.
And frankly, hacking into Sony is not that hard to do.