It Hasn't Been a Drill for Quite Some Time.

To the media, and presumably also NSA/GCHQ, its a 'cyber war'. To the techies at their keyboards, its being called Infosec. The latter is perhaps a more descriptive and less emotive term. 

As with most examples of human conflict over the past millennia, its being fought over resources and due to fear. And as with most recent examples of human conflict as instigated by Western developed nations, its another example of a pre-emptive strike. Case in point, the US & Israel have essentially admitted to developing Stuxnet & Flame for the specific purpose of sabotaging Iran's nuclear efforts. 

I could blather on all day about the professional and truly fiendish design of these two viruses, but I have enough to do today. Best just describe their main features. Stuxnet, we know, was changing the spin cycles for centrifuges; clearly the US & Israel feel that Iran's nuclear programme is a genuine threat, and are worried that Iran is that close to developing weapons grade material. Flame appeared to be doing the same thing, but also rather a lot more. The virus itself was only discovered after someone realised it had infected a number of Iranian oil refineries, which hints, along with the rather more modular design, that this tool was being used in multiple areas. 

Three nearly entirely irrelevant images.

Just look...

Presumably industrial espionage here mostly, but I can so easily picture military types having things patiently explained to them by rather paler, skinnier types. After a while, they get the picture, possibly say something like 'so its sort of like kicking the legs from underneath them, but we don't need to use bombs or cut off their supply lines?' Then, after some relatively heavy cognition on the part of the military type, the glowing realisation that this makes warfare cheaper and easier wins over the disappointment of not being able to bomb anything.

...how far we've come.

Onto a different slice of wildly inaccurate future-monging, remember the bitching I did about unmanned drones? I wrote that ages before I posted it and things are still moving forward, basically toward vehicles that can stay aloft for longer, can fly higher and quieter, and carry larger and larger payloads. Thus, we can perhaps assume that this is an area of significant interest for military tech/research companies. Soooo, with the amount of money being poured in, and the effectiveness of these machines, we can perhaps assume that remotely controlled, unmanned vehicles are the future of warfare. 

Lets drift thirty years into the future, by which point these are also used for general surveillance, (you know governments wanna do it) and our thoroughly pissed off 'enemy' nation states have got a whole lot better at this cyber war thing. Incidentally, lets hope countries with booming IT/programming sectors such as India or China are friends with us by then, 'cos they can outcode us already. Anyway, I basically predict that it won't be too long before someone at least figures out how to jam communications going to drones, if not gain some degree of control. Iran already managed to snarfle a drone that went down (lets assume accidentally) in their territory, so you can bet they & other countries are going to have Top Men working on reverse engineering and finding out what they can. We also periodically see news reports that say things like 'blah blah admitted that an unnamed US defence contractor had its servers compromised and lost blah blah documents relating blah unnamed blah technologies'. 

Sure bodes well.

Some crappy sources:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/telecom/security/us-military-system-design-badly-compromised-in-march-cyber-attack [millitary gettin' h4xxd]

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/drone-virus-kept-quiet/ [millitary gettin' h4xxd]

http://mythoughtsoninfosec.wordpress.com/ [smidgeon on Stuxnet/Flame at the bottom]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-israel-developed-computer-virus-to-slow-iranian-nuclear-efforts-officials-say/2012/06/19/gJQA6xBPoV_story.html [US & Israel admit to authoring Stuxnet]

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2406087,00.asp [US & Israel admit to authoring Flame]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18517841 [Same as above two]

EDIT 29/06/12 : http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18643134

"American researchers took control of a flying drone by hacking into its GPS system"

On the positive side, this means they're aware of the potential issues. As you'd expect and hope.