The recent cyberattacks against Georgia have raised fears that an assault against the US could wreak similar havoc, though there is some reason to believe the US's Internet infrastructure is better equipped to deal with DDoS assaults than the small nation of Georgia. DDoS attacks, however, aren't particularly sophisticated, and it's possible that more advanced attack vectors could cripple the United States more effectively.
CNN's report on the United States' vulnerabilities doesn't explicitly state that the Russian hackers who attacked Georgia were directly attached to the Russian military, but implies that the online assault was, at the very least, coordinated with the real-world attacks. The problem is, there's apparently not much evidence to support this claim. Historically, online attacks have often followed real-world events that create controversy or tension between two opposing sides. Relations between Georgia and Russia have never been good, and grown increasingly fractious of late, so it's not surprising that hackers began attacking Georgian websites, including that of the President, in late July.
The attacks themselves, meanwhile, were absolutely nothing new. Botnets are readily available (and cheap), and DDoS assaults are practically the infantry of cyberwarfare. Such attacks require neither significant funds nor sophisticated attack vectors, and could conceivably be the work of a mere handful of people. The Russian government may have been involved in these attacks, but it certainly didn't need to be in order to guarantee their efficacy.
According to a recent report from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the United States has no effective means of unilaterally preventing coordinated attacks from striking US websites. Scott Borg, director of the United States Cyber Consequences Unit (a nonprofit organization), has stated that the US isn't necessarily vulnerable to the types of DDoS attacks that brought down Georgia, thanks to an abundance over server bandwidth, but could be the target of other, more sophisticated attacks, or attacks that physically originate within the United States itself. "We can command so much bandwidth that it's hard to overwhelm our servers," Borg told CNN. "We are vulnerable to more sophisticated attacks, but right now most of the people who want to do us harm don't have those capabilities."
The only problem with Borg's remarks is that he apparently neglected to include a "yet," at the end of them. Internet access, in one form or another, is being driven into developing nations at an astonishing rate, thanks to a combination of philanthropy and profit-making. Intel has the Atom, the ClassmatePC, and wireless research aimed directly at developing markets, while AMD has the 50x15 initiative. PC manufacturers, meanwhile, already rely on developing markets in China, Russia, India, and Brazil to drive both growth and profits.
Any effective security policy will have to take such growth into account, and plan accordingly. At present, technological dominance and superior infrastructure may give the United States a decisive edge, but history teaches that this edge will inevitably degrade as other countries either catch up or as the threats themselves evolve. In the 20th century, the American and Soviet nuclear arsenals proved to be successful deterrents against nuclear war, but the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rise of so-called rogue states significantly lowered the potential effectiveness of a nuclear strike. Long-term security policies should therefore assume that the United States will be threatened by hackers with access to sophisticated technology and bandwidth equal to that of our own nation, and move on from that point. Thus far, the US has failed to provide much in the way of a comprehensive security structure; the Air Force shelved its own Cyber Command program just last week.