DONNING THEIR CAPES and protecting us all from the vastly over-hyped cyber terrorism threat, a group called the International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber-Terrorism (IMPACT) will launch themselves at next week’s biannual World Congress of IT (WCIT).

Feeding off of mainstream media sensationalism about Cyber terrorism’s deadly threat to wipe out the world (or at least world wide web), the group aims to pool international resources to combat all those who would seemingly do us harm. Or hack.

The organisation has managed to recruit the likes of Google's Vint Cerf and Symantec’s CEO John Thompson, into an organisation made up of about 30 governments, of which Malaysia and the US are the principal money donors.

ArsTechinca spoke to one of IMPACT’s top guys, who described the organisation as becoming a kind of "CDC [Centers for Disease Control] for cyber security". IMPACT Chairman Mohd Noor Amin also told Ars that the forum would be a good place for governments to actually meet up and cooperate on things like cyber crime, which up until now, countries thought they could regulate from inside their own borders. Makes one wonder what they thought the “world wide” bits referred to in www.

Although mainly a government effort, the organisation did acknowledge that it would perhaps also consult with members of the academia and of global corporations, because both are at the same time most at risk, and most able to help in the war on cyber terrorism.

Ironically, however, the two countries most responsible for the ‘disease’ of cyber terrorism, Russia and China, have so far decided not to join IMPACT. µ

L’Inq
Ars Technica