Sounds a bit out there right! Well, consider that in April of 2009 in Easy Cellar a story published by the Wall Street Journal and later supported by the US Government, cyber spies from Russia, China and several other countries gained access to the US power grid. The cyber criminals inserted spy program code with the potential to direct the entire US electrical grid system on their command. In fact, between just 2008 and 2009 the Federal Government spent a hundred million dollars fixing cyber damage.
Here's another stunner. In 1997 the US Federal Government conducted a 5 day exercise from July 9-13. The US team of bad guys, referred to a "Team Red" aimed to get inside the US Pacific Command computers and see if they were vulnerable. The Team Red group was only allowed to use common hacker techniques and tools like login scripts to break a password, scanning software to test a network.