Most Mainers still have vivid memories of the great ice storm of 1998, which paralyzed a strip of North America from southern Maine through Quebec and Nova Scotia.

Millions of people were plunged into cold and darkness when the storm snapped trees and dragged down power lines.

Businesses were closed, shelters were opened and people paid premium prices for home generators.

It was, simply, chaos.

Now, imagine the same effect but without the ice, and covering the Eastern Seaboard in the dead of winter.

That’s how the first cyber war might start, retired Adm. Mike McConnell recently told “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Kroft.

McConnell is a former chief of national intelligence who oversaw the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.

“If I were an attacker and I wanted to do strategic damage to the United States, I would either take the cold of winter or the heat of summer,” he told Kroft.

“I probably would sack electric power on the U.S. East Coast … and attempt to cause a cascading effect.” That’s where power grids in different states begin to collapse in sequence, resulting in a rolling blackout.

According to McConnell, the U.S. is still woefully unprepared to fend off such an attack.

And, sometimes, we’re not doing much to help ourselves.

Sen. Charles Shumer recently demanded that the Government Printing Office halt outsourcing the manufacture of the computer chips embedded in U.S. passports.

In a real head-slapper, the GPO had contracted with a factory in a Thailand city known as a hotbed of terrorist activity.

This, despite existing evidence that foreign governments have managed to plant spyware in chips used in consumer and business devices sold in the U.S.

Maine U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, ranking member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, has been hearing testimony this week on a bill to stiffen U.S. cyber security.

In a statement issued Tuesday, Collins revealed that Congress and the executive branch computers are attacked 1.8 billion times per month, and that cyber crime is already costing the U.S. $8 billion a year.

Governments, including the U.S., have rooms full of hackers who spend their days probing the cyber defenses of other countries.

Foreign governments have previously penetrated U.S. cyber defenses, downloading gigabytes of Defense Department data and lurking for days within government computer systems before being discovered.

“We simply cannot wait for a cyber 9/11 before our government takes this threat seriously and acts to protect these critical assets,” Collins said.

They say generals are too often prepared to fight the last war.

Let’s hope the next Pearl Harbor isn’t an invisible string of computer code winging its way through cyberspace.

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