No doubt some forward thinking individuals are gauging the need for some degree of pro-activity to things like this:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...9157/Georgia-Russia-conducting-cyber-war.html
As far as I recall this is the first publicly observed case of a significant cyber attack coordinated with a land invasion. Conducted effectively it does constitute as a significant force multiplier.
Disrupting lines of communication, establishing fearsome reputation, deception, and skull ***** your opponents to kingdom come with targeted psyops all trace their military sources waaaay back to the times of yore. The strategies remain fundamentally the same but the medium (and thus the defence) evolves out with.
Advancements in the long overlooked science behind Network Theory illustrate how the seemingly invulnerability of the 'Tinternet can actually be used against it, effectively isolate and shut down countries, perhaps even groups of countries.
Of course it wouldn't have be simple case of phones are dead, better reboot and run the virus scanner. If recent patterns of attacks are anything to go by, it takes months and costs millions to clean up relatively mild mannered peace-time attacks.
So while global recession, collapsed financial markets and frozen international and nation trade might be symptoms of other phenomenon, I bet there are some industrious fellows out there who could draw upon that, model it at a smaller scale and fire if off whenever called to do so.
It takes very few points of attack, and very few individuals to make it a real bad time for quite a few million. It's the fact that some have achieved it without really knowing how that defies all logic.