Well said - the radical elements get a lot more bang for their buck with
well placed media stories, than they would ever likely get from a cyber
attack on the Internet. The one point to consider is that there are
critical networks for the economy that run on shared infrastructure also
used by the Internet. Hence studying the susceptibility of the Internet
can be more than an exercise is guarateeing porn availability.
Proprietary issues aside there is a lot to be learned and for fairly
good reasons. Micro-biologists study the neural network of the c.elgans
worm not because they give a crap about worm brains but because it gives
insight to a bigger picture. Not the best analogy but ya get the drift.