Are we all potential cyberterrorists now?

Hollywood got there first, of course. Back in 1983, before most of us even learned — then forgot again — what a modem was, Matthew Broderick starred in the seminal and brilliant WarGames. He played a computer hacker; a teenager who goes hunting for games on the global computer network that isn’t quite called the internet, yet. Unwittingly, he instead hacks into Norad, the North American Aerospace Defense Command and, via a convoluted series of events we need not go into here, very nearly sparks World War Three.

Various angry generals assume, first of all, that he is the Russians. Then they assume he must at least be working for the Russians. But he isn’t. He’s just some kid who isn’t even Ferris Bueller yet. At his fingertips, nonetheless, is the expertise to blow up the world. I thought of him this week, when a boy of 15 was arrested in County Antrim on suspicion of hacking into the broadband provider which sponsors The X Factor.

It might not have been him. He was freed on bail the next day. The point, though, is that it could have been. No, the hacking of TalkTalk was not quite World War Three, although Lord knows you could have been forgiven for thinking it was, given the fuss made on Radio 4’s Today programme. Was somebody senior a customer, perhaps? Either way, the initial suspicion was that it could have been cyberterrorists of some sort; perhaps Islamists. Somebody ominous. And maybe it was. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was nobody much at all.

Western security services are on a cyber-PR push right now. Possibly it’s the groundwork for Britain’s pending Investigatory Powers Bill, which seems to be popping up at the same time as America’s Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act.