It reads like a John le Carre script. An eastern European country being attacked on an unprecedented scale with Nato sending in its top terrorism experts. Except the attack was a cyber-assault - disabling the websites of government ministries, political parties, newspapers and banks.
The crisis was triggered by a Distributed Denial of Service. This is where hackers hijack masses of computers using malware (basically, evil software) and, at a specific point in time, launch a concerted burst of traffic to overwhelm computer servers and bring them to a halt.
These 'virtual' attacks have very real consequences.
In February hackers, possibly residing in South Korea, briefly overwhelmed at least three of the 13 computers that help manage global computer traffic.
The servers involved were each operated by a separate body - the US Defense Department, the internet's oversight body ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and UltraDNS, which manages traffic for websites ending in ".org" and some other suffixes.
It was subsequently reported by Network World that the Department of Defense was prepared, on the authority of the US President, to launch a cyber counter attack, or worse real bombing of perpetrators.
Last year ZDNet UK reported that researchers from the University of Cambridge found a way to launch DoS attacks against China in a cleverly names article called 'Academic breaks the Great Firewall of China'.
Computer experts found a way to use China's firewall - which censors keywords and traffic for content China wants blocked from web users such as Falun Gong - to launch attacks against specific IP addresses in the country.
The question is whether we all need to worry about the meltdown of our increasingly internet-dependent society from full state-level cyber terrorism?
Well, despite the seriousness of the attack on the root of the world wide web in the US, experts mildly said that it might simply have been done "to be disruptive or show-off".
And in 2000 Amazon, eBay and a number of other big sites were humbled by attacks from someone called Mafiaboy.
He turned out to be a Canadian schoolboy who was eventually caught after bragging to friends about the attacks.
