ARTICLE: “Dangerous Fakes: How counterfeit, defective computer components from China are getting into U.S. warplanes and ships,” by Brian Grow, Chi-Chu Tschang, Cliff Edwards and Brian Burnsed, BusinessWeek, 13 October 2008.

This is the longer-term and just an inescapable fear as those our military originally bumped into regarding Y2K: the defense industry, in its network-centricity, has gone global to a stunning degree.

The main carrier of the virus: counterfeit computer chips.

The knee jerk is to declare the need for IT autarky—about as oxymoronic a concept as one can come up with in our networked world.

The smarter play is to recognize that the connected world has been made as interdependent in the security realm as it has become in the financial realm.

So the answer is more regulation and transparency.