This week, President Obama issued an executive order to strengthen the nation's cyber security against what the government sees as a potentially cataclysmic threat. There has been plenty of drum beating about the threat of cyber warfare, but just how realistic is the threat of an attack that could wreak havoc on our national infrastructure? In a story from August of 2012, On the Media producer Alex Goldman investigates.

Jun Miyake - Lillies of the Valley

This week, I did a piece assessing the risk of "cyberwar," and the concern about so-called “kinetic” cyber attacks - cyber attacks that would cause real-world damage. One of the people I talked to was Eireann Leverett, a security researcher at IO Active. He told me that in spite of the danger it posed, he found more than 12,000 industrial control systems, the kind of systems that control critical infrastructure, connected to the public internet. But how, exactly, did he do it?

Last week, a massive, seemingly bi-partisan Cyber Security bill was filibustered in the Senate. The bill would have outlined voluntary standards to protect critical infrastructure from "cyber attack." There has been plenty of drum beating about the threat of cyber warfare, but just how realistic is the threat of an attack that could wreak havoc on our national infrastructure? On the Media producer Alex Goldman investigates.