The Utah Republican told the audience, who came to learn about the perils of "botnets," that Y2K is what got him interested in Internet-related issues. Following a slew of hearings and billions of dollars spent by industry, the world was safe when the new millennium dawned.

Bennett said that when the debate over Y2K was winding down, he began thinking about what would happen if all the computers in the world failed on purpose, perhaps at the hands of a masterful hacker, rather than by accident.

The good news, he said, is that the U.S. is "several generations ahead" of the rest of the world when it comes to innovation. The bad news is that "we're enormously vulnerable if we don’t get the firewalls and patches right" to thwart cyber attacks. The "survival of Western civilization" depends on it, he added.

Read more about the botnet briefing, sponsored by Microsoft and the Association for Computing Machinery, in Technology Daily's PM edition.