What if everything went wrong? That’s the possibility security experts confronted here today at Computerworld’s Premier 100 conference as panelists with real-world experience in government, software development, Internet service and corporate IT security worked their way through an unfolding fictional scenario of a massive cyberattack on critical U.S. infrastructure after an invasion of Iraq by U.S. and allied forces. Based on how these experts responded to the fabricated events, the story doesn’t have a particularly happy ending. Even under the assumption that government and industry would be operating at a high level of alert during an invasion of Iraq, an outbreak of viruses, worms and other cyberattacks — combined with physical terrorist actions in the fictional city of “Metropolis” — showed the manner in which effective coordination between government agencies and private industry would be hampered. In fact, stopping such an attack might prove impossible. Full Story