| LIGHTS OUT A Cyberattack | A Nation Unprepared | Surviving the Aftermath Ted Koppel New York: Broadway Books, October 2016 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-553-41998-6 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-553-41998-6 | 279pp. | SC | $16.00 | |
"Ours has become a largely reactive culture. We are disinclined to anticipate disaster, let alone prepare for it. We wait for bad things to happen and then we assign blame. Despite mounting evidence of cyber crime and cyber sabotage, there appears to be widespread confidence that each can be contained before it inflicts unacceptable damage. The notion that some entity has either the ability or the motive to launch a sophisticated cyberattack against our nation's infrastructure, and in particular against our electric power grids, exists, if at all, on the outer fringes of public consciousness. It is true that unless and until it happens, there is no proof that it can; for now, what we are left with, for better or worse, is the testimony of experts. There will be more than a few who take issue with the conclusions of this author that the grid is at risk. This book reflects the assessment of those in the military and intelligence communities and the academic, industrial, and civic authorities who brought me to the conclusion that it is." – Page 14 |
Throughout the twentieth century, America's landline telephone systems were immune to failure of electrical power. Every office had a large battery which stood ready to support communication by telephone for days, at least. Now, however, the same is not true for cellular telephone systems. If power goes out, they will fail along with the Internet — so that millions of people, as well as losing lights, refrigeration, heating & cooling, and running water in their homes will lose the ability to communicate.
And if the power outage lasts for more than a few days, a variety of factors will combine to make the crisis a matter of survival.1
Over the years, the formerly monopolistic and vertically-integrated suppliers of electrical power were split up into power producers, power distributors, and local "last mile" providers that routed power to homes and businesses. This increased competition lowered prices, but it also fractured the industry into thousands of jurisdictions, making regulation difficult. This has implications for all manner of problems, but it is critical for ending the power system's vulnerability to cyberattacks, which are increasing in frequency and sophistication.
"Oh, Hi! I'm a power outage. I'm going to take your power and severely inconvenience you! Boom! Boom! Boom! Lights out, everybody!
What is that?"
Corporations are happy to create solutions for problems if they expect to turn a profit — as with the product that is sold via this declaration. (It's a power-backup system for the home.) But it's another story when it comes to assuring public safety.
"Attempting to alert the American public to an impending crisis becomes more difficult when the subject itself is complicated and defies easy or brief explanation. If only we could defer to the experts—but in today's political environment we have become conditioned to the notion that there is an expert to support almost any point of view. It has never been more difficult to convince the American public of anything that it is not already inclined to believe." – Page 14 |
The same is true of government nowadays. The author tells us at the end of this chapter that in 2010 a bipartisan group of national security experts wrote to the House Energy and Commerce Committee supporting the pending Grid Reliability and Infrastructure Defense Act. The House soon passed it, but as of the book's publication five years later it remained stuck in the Senate.
Providing electric power of adequate quality demands balancing power demand with supply from moment to moment. The Internet is the medium by which the data communication to accomplish this is done. The servers that support the Internet may be immune to power outages and hacking, but many of the client systems are not. Some recent developments:
The point is that neither corporations nor U.S. government agencies can guarantee their systems are immune to cyberattack. If a competent hacker such as Russia gains access to the computers running our electrical power grids, it might be able to put large portions of it out of action for months. Ted Koppel vividly describes what that would mean.
And cyberwar is not the only threat to our power systems. Others are EMP attacks, physical sabotage, and solar storms.
Detonation of a nuclear weapon high in the atmosphere can produce a powerful EMP, or electromagnetic pulse. This happened with the Starfish Prime nuclear test, a bomb of 1.44 MT yield exploded 250 miles above the mid-Pacific ocean in July 1962. The EMP was stronger than calculated, causing damage on Hawaii over 900 miles distant. Later tests in the Operation Fishbowl series gave physicists enough data to calculate the EMP effect of a given bomb.
Damage on Hawaii was minor due to the relatively low yield of the bomb and the greater robustness of equipment then. Most electronics used vacuum tubes. Today's personal computers and solid-state communications gear would be more vulnerable.
In September 1859 came a sudden disruption of telegraph systems across Europe and North America, in some cases giving their operators electric shocks. One pair of operators was able to operate for two hours with their batteries disconnected, just on the auroral current. And aurorae worldwide were of startling brightness, visible at very low latitudes. This became known as the Carrington Event after the British astronomer who recorded it — the first known instance of a solar flare, or coronal mass ejection (CME), interacting with Earth's magnetic field. At the time, telegraph systems were the only large-scale usage of electricity; today a CME of similar strength would play havoc with our world.
San Jose, California slept quietly on the night of 16 April 2013. Around 1 AM, saboteurs approached the Metcalf Transmission Substation south of the city. They first entered an underground vault and cut the fiber-optic cables that would have carried sensor data for the substation. Then, taking up positions that appear to have been marked in advance by piles of rocks outside the fence, they fired assault rifles into the site, knocking out 17 transformers. They left at 1:50 AM, one minute before police arrived. There is still no clue to the identities of these saboteurs.
PG&E officials were able to avoid a blackout by rerouting power. It took repair crews 27 days to bring the substation back online. A wider attack would almost certainly have deprived a large area of power and probably for a longer time.2
The rest of the book describes how tenuous are official preparations for such an attack, and how some communities are preparing on their own. They are the "preppers" — non-ideological descendants of Cold-War survivalists. They stockpile food, water and supplies. They buy generators and fuel for them. They step up to the problem when the government will not. The best that can be said is that government and industry are aware of the problem and are working on solutions.
The upshot of all this is that there is significant risk of large parts of the U.S. going without electrical power for months or years. With all the problems that face this modern world, it is understandable that reading about one more will not be a fun thing. Still, Ted Koppel has done an excellent job of reporting the scope of this problem, and in my view it is something all citizens should nerve themselves to understand. I give it full marks and rate it a must-read. It has thorough endnotes and a good index, but in my opinion it is not a keeper. Rather, it is something you should read and pass on.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.