THE HILL: Sony hack reveals threat of ‘psychological’ cyber warfare.

When U.S. policymakers discuss the threat of cyberattacks, the focus is often on their destructive potential — overheating a nuclear power plant’s core reactor, or eliminating essential financial records.

But the apparent success of the Sony hit has exposed the effectiveness of psychological cyber attacks. The attack prompted the studio to pull the movie, costing millions of dollars, damaging Sony’s reputation and reportedly leaving its top executives on the ropes.

“Where cyber can probably be successful is in these psychological operations,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which monitors critical infrastructure attacks. “Cyber is not necessarily extremely useful in conducting physically destructive attacks.”

That raises the question: Has the U.S. been miscalculating a major looming cyber threat?

“I don’t think anybody, and I include the Department of Defense in this, does a good job of thinking about what future kinds of cyber conflicts look like,” said Jason Healey, a director at the Atlantic Council who has worked on cyber defenses at the White House and for Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong.

We used to be better at that sort of thing.