Administrators associated with the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) and with CERT's (Computer Emergency Response Team) Coordination Center have so far not found evidence that any cyber attacks were coordinated with the physical attacks on the U.S. Tuesday.

But Marv Langston, former deputy CIO for the Department of Defense (DoD), told news publications that the United States needs to prepare itself for "an electronic Pearl Harbor."

NIPC officials convened for an emergency meeting to analyze any strands of intelligence that might have some connection with the attacks.

Nothing Out of the Ordinary

Ryan Russell, incident analyst for SecurityFocus.com, the Internet security firm that first discovered and wrote up the Code Red II virus, told NewsFactor Network that his group has yet to see anything out of the ordinary over the last 24 hours.

"We have been watching for any unusual attack patterns very carefully," Russell told NewsFactor. "We haven't detected any major denial of service attacks, no new worms or viruses, nothing of that sort yet."

Frank Prince, an analyst with Forrester Research, told NewsFactor that the terrorist attacks on the U.S. are, for now, not an Internet story.

There was no apparent Internet-related component to the attack, Prince said. "The Internet itself was resilient in the face of the upsurge of usage that occurred," he added.

Cyber World Not Sleeping

Russell did say that SecurityFocus would continue to monitor activities at the request of the U.S. government. He added that the agencies in charge of watching for cyber attacks are on alert as well.

Ben Venzke, CEO of IntelCenter, noted in an e-mail that "cyber-based actors are calling for cyber attacks against Arab nation state networks and terrorist computer networks." He added that we should "expect Arab hackers to retaliate if attacks materialize."

Michael Rasmussen, a senior industry analyst for enterprise security with Giga Information Group, sent NewsFactor a "cautionary" brief about the potential cyber-crisis.

In the brief, Rasmussen wrote that while "we are not aware of any hostile activities directed at the Internet and information structures of the United States, there will undoubtedly be a cyber component to [Tuesday's] events in some form or another."

Recent Examples, Future Fears

Rasmussen cited the recent cyberwar between Chinese and U.S. hackers as an example, adding that "organizations were a target just for being associated with the opposing country," and that the targets were not exclusively military.

"Just because attention [has been] diverted to the physical world does not mean the cyberworld is sleeping," said Rasmussen. "There may very well be cyber attacks underway, or planned in the near future, as a result of today's events."

Analyst Russell told NewsFactor that as disruptive as Internet attacks can be to critical infrastructure , Tuesday's events demonstrate that attacks in the physical world are still a lot more devastating that those in cyberspace -- so far.

Said Russell: "I'm not looking forward to the day when medical or building control devices are connected to the Internet to the point where lives can be ended with software."