As a NYT story “Who Needs Hackers?” points out, increasingly major computer disruptions are being caused by the complexity of the systems themselves, not by rogue hackers. LAX, for example, was shut down for hours this past August, stranding 17,000 passengers because of a single NIC card failure.

In 2003 I wrote about events that led up to the electrical grid blackout in the Eastern US and Canada which turned out to be a cascading series of technical problems, unforeseen consequences and incompatible systems behaving unpredictably.

“We don’t need hackers to break the systems because they’re falling apart by themselves,” said Peter G. Neumann, an expert in computing risks and principal scientist at SRI International, a research institute in Menlo Park, Calif.

“We have gone from fairly simple computing architectures to massively distributed, massively interconnected and interdependent networks,” said Andreas M. Antonopoulos, a founding partner at Nemertes Research, a technology research company in Mokena, Ill., adding that as a result, flaws have become increasingly hard to predict or spot.

Simpler systems could be understood and their behavior characterized, he said, but greater complexity brings unintended consequences. “On the scale we do it, it’s more like forecasting weather,” he said. What’s the weather like on the Net this morning…?

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