The Interwebs; good for information, socialising, business and cute pictures of animals, and playground for burglars monitoring social network feeds for people going on holiday and governments plotting cyber-warfare strategies. Not quite as apocalyptic as intelligent robots taking over the world and creating a virtual world in which to enslave humans, but it’s early days yet.

First off, I need to state that I’m not climbing back on my anti-technology soapbox, I woke up and smelt the terabytes ages ago, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t comment on the potential pitfalls of over-dependence on the web and the increasing sophistication of nations with an international axe to grind.

Now that Afghanistan has been reduced to rubble and Iraq has been properly ‘liberated’, North Korea is staking its claim as the new nexus of evil. Along with missile tests and aggressive posturing, the strangely combative country is apparently stepping up its cyber presence with attacks on South Korean and US governmental websites.

Well, that is according to South Korea, which says it has traced the attacks back to North Korea. The US is either being too diplomatic to apportion blame, or is unwilling to admit that some of its most important websites were undermined by a country is still deems very third world. South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, however, is adamant that the attacks came from ‘North Korea or pro-North elements’, adding that the attacks were meticulously well prepared.

A number of US governmental websites were affected, including the White House, State Treasury Department and Secret Service. White House spokesman, Nick Shapiro, claims that the attack had no effect on ‘day-to-day’ operations at the White House and that the only real problem was denial-of-service. He added that all preventative measures performed as planned.

While the US underplays the inconvenience of being hacked on a semi-large scale and South Korea points fingers at a newly stepped up specialist cyber-warfare unit in North Korea, Mashable’s Stan Schroeder says that the real concern is not so much that an attack took place, but the potential measures that will be put in place to deal with international cyber wars. As he says, a cyber war could lead to tighter government control over the net, more censorship and serious invasion of privacy. Without international cooperation, the entire world could face Internet usage regulations such as those currently in place in China and Iran.

And for someone who only recently accepted that greater technological sophistication has more pros than cons (except search engines who can read my mind, please not that), that is a very bitter pill to swallow.

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