By Richard Stiennon, Chief Research Analyst, IT-Harvest

Scenario planning is a useful technique for risk reduction.

A group of key players in an organization are brought together to brainstorm possible events and their impact on business.

Scenario planning, done rigorously, could help an airline hedge against rising fuel prices, a vaccine manufacturer scale up for a pandemic, or a bank prepare for a Distributed Denial of Service attack.

But scenarios have little value in public prognostications of future cyber attacks.

From a review of a 2001 book “Information Warfare” by Michael Erbschloe:

There’s a realistic doomsday scenario described by the author, dubbed Pearl Harbor 2 (PH2), where a group of ten strategically trained hackers can disrupt $1 trillion (US) of economic activities over a sustained period. Offering day-by-day details of the first three weeks of the scenario, you should find much of the details familiar, like using email viruses for the initial outbreak. Overall, a well thought out scenario, and not all that too far fetched these days.

Scary stuff.