While mainstream media has essentially become a profit-driven, self-serving producer of fear and anxiety for the general public, there is a looming threat which has received very little mainstream media attention and is real, immediate and directly impacts the core systems upon which depend the daily lives of nearly all residents in any developed nation: cyber attacks on major utilities infrastructure. Hacking into networks is no new threat – corporations, individuals and nation states have been both victims and perpetrators of gaining malicious access to systems – but what has historically been an effort to simply seize data, is quickly evolving to include the manipulation, tampering and even sabotage of systems and equipment critical to delivering the basic services that humans rely on, including electricity, communications, water & sewage and even food and other commodities.
Malware (malicious software) is common across the internet and has the potential to infect any device or equipment connected to the internet and can even be spread by human users through portable storage devices such as USB thumb drives. One surprisingly dangerous malware referred to as “Triton” has now been discovered and has profound implications on how we view risks to communities and national security because it is specifically designed to target and “disable safety systems designed to prevent catastrophic industrial accidents.” First identified in 2017, this code was found in a petrochemical plant in Saudi Arabia and allowed the hackers to take control of the safety systems of the plant which are designed to detect and respond to dangerous conditions as well as activate shutdowns or other contingencies to mitigate disaster in the case of an accident or system failure. Fortunately, a mistake in the code triggered multiple system alerts over a period of months and investigators were able to isolate and discover the problem. Any failure during these events – either on the part of the plant’s systems or initiated by the hackers – would have had catastrophic consequences on not only the plant but could have brought death and destruction to the communities in the areas around the plant.
One of the most frequently-attacked targets of large-scale hackers is the power sector. We tend to think about what it would be like to be in a house or an office without electricity, but “highly dependent systems—such as financial, communications, transportation, water, and sewer networks—would be severely impacted, leaving the population immobile, incommunicado, and in the dark. In a word, vulnerable.” As if the impact of such attacks isn’t enough, the perpetrators of these attacks have become more diverse. While a lone hacker with the right set of advanced skills has long been the image of cyber danger, expansive criminal organizations and nation states have evolved to wage crime and war in cyberspace, with results that are sure to reach deep across borders and into communities and disrupt – if not destroy – the way of life for countless urban dwellers who have long considered themselves safe from the global conflict and crime that has always affected someone else.
Recent Comments