“They will enter the cyber world because it’s comparatively remote, comparatively safer than strapping on a bomb,” Black said during his keynote speech at the Black Hat Technical Security Conference in Las Vegas today. The Black Hat conference is an annual convention that attracts thousands of the world’s top cyber security experts and hackers alike…

Cyber attacks, whether from terrorists, criminal groups or nation-states, have reordered counter-terror experts’ views on the greatest dangers to the U.S., Black said. One of the major turning points in defense thinking, he said, was the Stuxnet worm that reportedly attacked and physically damaged an Iranian nuclear facility in 2010. After the worm’s discovery, a U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security hearing marked the attack as the beginning of a new era in cyber warfare: The Age of Stuxnet.

“The Stuxnet attack is the Rubicon of our future,” Black said. “This is huge.”