Cyber Warfare (2 page)

Our enemies can come at us in so many ways. A day does not go by without news of a cyber-terrorism incident. What if these cyber attacks are just a series of trial runs before one large massive, coordinated attack on our banking, governmental and utility servers? An electromagnetic pulse delivered by a nuclear warhead or a series of electromagnetic pulse weapons fired at strategic locations across the country could bring down our power grid. For the first time, Russia has more deployed nuclear assets than the United States does. Can you say "outnumbered"?

What if
?

Widespread Pandemic or BioTerror

Our government is intent on
calming the fears
of the American people as to the likelihood of the Ebola virus hitting US soil. The presence of the Ebola virus came as a result of bringing Ebola-stricken health care workers into the country. Keep in mind that these were people who are experts in treating this virus and who were provided all of the necessary equipment to prevent contracting Ebola. As the CDC was calming our fears, a Nigerian national flew into Dallas with Ebola potentially infecting hundreds and ultimately dying while in the government's care.

The question has to be asked—
What is wrong with a little fear amongst the masses
?

Fear is a great motivator; it is designed to be compelling so that we take survival action in the form of fight, flight, or freeze.

In 1763, the British fortress at Fort Pitt in Delaware was under siege. Letters were exchanged between British General Jeffrey Amherst and Colonel Henry Bouquet as to proposed defensive tactics.

General Amherst suggested: "
Could it not be contrived to send the Smallpox among those disaffected tribes of Indians
?"

Weaponized smallpox. Is it not plausible that our enemies could weaponize Ebola? In the name of Jihad, is it not possible that one would contract the Ebola virus and enter the United States with the intention of creating a pandemic? The news outlets that raise these possibilities are labeled fear mongers and racists. But have you noticed that Amazon is selling out of particulate masks and other bio-hazard supplies? Fear is a great motivator.

What if
?

Near Earth Object - SuperVolcano Eruption - Natural Disaster

Any of the above naturally occurring events could wreak havoc on our power grid, our atmosphere, and our climate. These are not the catastrophic events known only in science fiction movies. There is a historical precedent for them all.

A major earthquake along the New Madrid Fault in the central United States could collapse bridges over the Mississippi River. An earthquake of this magnitude along the New Madrid happened before in 1811 and 1812. The New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ) is comprised of eight states: Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee.

The Wabash Valley Seismic Zone (WVSZ) in southern Illinois and southeast Indiana together with the East Tennessee Seismic Zone in eastern Tennessee and northeastern Alabama, constitute a significant risk of moderate-to-severe earthquakes throughout the central region of the USA.

Studies indicate the Tennessee will incur the highest level of economic damage and societal impact. According to the Mid-America Earthquake Center, over 300,000 buildings would be moderately or more severely damaged, over 290,000 people will be displaced and well over 70,000 casualties are expected. Total direct economic losses surpass $56 billion. These results focus on the immediate effects of the massive earthquake itself. As preppers, we consider the ancillary impact in the form of societal unrest — looting, death from sickness and murder.

The States of Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky and Illinois would also incur significant losses. Studies indicate a potential direct economic loss reaching over $150 billion.

The indirect economic loss due to business interruption and loss of market share is at least as high if not far greater than the direct economic losses. Scientists and economists predict the total economic impact of a series of NMSZ earthquakes is likely to constitute the highest economic loss due to a natural disaster in U.S. history.

The economic losses and societal impact for each state should be considered separately. Since each scenario is based on a different hazard, adding results together will not reflect an accurate scenario. It 's hard to gauge the potential loss of life resulting from a natural disaster of this magnitude.

Critical infrastructure and lifelines will also be heavily damaged and will be out of service after the earthquake for a considerable period. The resulting collapse of the power grid and transportation routes are likely to affect a region much larger than the eight states referenced above. Many hospitals nearest to the epicenter will not be able to care for its patients. Many of those injured during the disaster will have to be transported outside of the region for medical attention. Moreover, pre-disaster patients will be required to continue their care outside of the area to fully functioning hospitals.

It is doubtful that the transportation system will be intact. Damage to the transportation system will hinder mass evacuation efforts. First responders will be severely impaired due to police and fire stations throughout the impacted region. Public shelters will be damaged and unusable after the earthquake.

The scenario described for a New Madrid Zone earthquake can be applied to other catastrophic disaster events. Strikes by near earth objects such as asteroids can be extinction level events. Likewise, a massive eruption of the Yellowstone Super Volcano could result in climate change that would alter the entire food production system of the Northern Hemisphere.

What if
?

Coronal Mass Ejection – Solar Flare

Imagine our way of life without power for weeks on end as a result of a massive solar flare striking the Earth. It happened in 1859 in what is commonly referred to as the Carrington Event.

For telegraph operators in the Americas and Europe, however, the experience caused chaos. Many found that their lines were just unusable—they could neither send nor receive messages. Others were able to operate even with their power supplies turned off, using only the current in the air from the solar storm.

From historical reports, one telegraph operator said "The line was in perfect order, and skilled operators worked incessantly from eight o'clock last evening until one o’clock this morning to transmit, in an intelligible form, four hundred words of the report per steamer Indian for the Associated Press."

Other operators experienced physical danger. Washington, D.C., operator Frank Royce said "I received a very severe electric shock, which stunned me for an instant. An old man who was sitting facing me, and but a few feet distant, said that he saw a spark of fire jump from my forehead to the sounder."

At the time, the telegraph was a new technology and never experienced technical difficulties of this type. But the story offers an important warning for modern society. The Carrington Event, as the 1859 solar storm has been named, provides evidence of the fragility of electrical infrastructure. Scientific American reported in October of 1859: “The electromagnetic basis of the various phenomena was identified relatively quickly. A connection between the northern lights and forces of electricity and magnetism is now fully established."

Over the last one hundred and fifty years, the world’s critical infrastructure has become a more integral part of daily life. In the nineteenth century, telegraphs composed a comparatively small and relatively non-essential part of everyday life. Their successors today—including the electrical grid and much of the telecommunications network—are essential to modern life.

Is the current system any more protected from catastrophic interference than the telegraph of the nineteenth century? Can the power grid handle a terrorist attack, or severe weather events, or a solar storm?

There's never been a real test to prove it, but there is a robust debate about the vulnerability of the power grid. The most dangerous and costly possibilities for major catastrophes, the collapse of the nation’s critical infrastructure, might visit the United States from any number of methods.

One scenario is a repeat of the solar storm as big as the 1859 Carrington. A solar event of this magnitude hasn't struck the earth since, although there have been smaller ones. In 1989, a coronal mass ejection caused a blackout across parts of Canada, especially in Quebec. As a result of complications across the interconnected grid, a large transformer in New Jersey permanently failed.

In 2003, residents of the northeastern United States experienced a grid down scenario. It doesn't take an unprecedented solar flare to knock out power. The combination of a few trees touching power lines, and a few power companies asleep at the wheel, plunged a section of the nation into darkness. The darkness can spread. As the difficulties at Ohio-based FirstEnergy grew and eventually cascaded over the grid, electrical service from Detroit to New York City was lost. The 2003 event was a comparatively minor episode compared to what might have happened. Most customers had their power back within a couple of days, and the transformers were relatively unaffected.

Compare this event with the incident in Auckland, New Zealand. Cables supplying power to the downtown business district failed in 1998. The center of the city went dark. Companies were forced to shutter or relocate their operations outside the affected area. The local Auckland utility had to adopt drastic measures to move in temporary generators. They even enlisted the assistance of the world's largest cargo plane—owned by rock band
U2
, to transport massive generators into the area. It took five weeks for the power grid to be fully restored.

There are contrarians. Jeff Dagle, an electrical engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory who served on the Northeast Blackout Investigation Task Force argues “one lesson of the 2003 blackout is that the power grid is more resilient than you might think.”

The task force investigators pinpointed four separate root causes for the collapse, and human error played a significant role. "It took an hour for it to collapse with no one managing it," Dagle said. "They would have been just as effective if they had just gone home for the day. That to me just underscores how remarkably stable things are."

As awareness was raised by Congress, the National Academies of Science produced a report detailing the risk of a major solar event. The 2008 NAS report paints a dire picture based on a study conducted for FEMA and Electromagnetic Pulse Commission created by Congress.

While severe solar storms do not occur that often, they have the potential for long-term catastrophic impacts to the nation’s power grid. Impacts would be felt on interdependent infrastructures. For example, the potable water distribution will be affected immediately. Pumps and purification facilities rely on electricity. The nation’s food supply will be disrupted and most perishable foods will spoil and lost within twenty-four hours. There will be immediate or eventual loss of heating/air conditioning, sewage disposal, phone service, transportation, fuel resupply, and many of the necessities we take for granted.

According to the EMP Commission, the effects will be felt for years, and its economic costs could add up to trillions of dollars—dwarfing the cost of Hurricane Katrina. More importantly, the commission’s findings state a potential loss of life that is staggering. Within one year, according to their conclusions, ninety percent of Americans would die.

But skeptics say it's the opposite. Jon Wellinghoff, who served as chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission—commonly known as FERC, from 2009 to 2013, has sounded the alarm about the danger of an attack on the system. The heightened awareness came as a result of an April 2013 incident in Silicon Valley, California in which a group of attackers conducted a coordinated assault on an electrical substation, knocking out 27 transformers. FERC points to the fact that the U.S. power grid is broken into three big sections known as
interconnections
. There is one each for the Eastern United States, the West, and—out on its own—Texas. In fact, the East and West interconnections also include much of Canada and parts of Mexico.

In a 2013 report, FERC concluded that if a limited number of substations in each of those interconnects were disabled, utilities cannot bring the interconnect back up again for an indeterminate amount of time. FERC’s conclusion isn't classified information. This information has been in government reports and widely disseminated on the internet for years.

FERC also notes it could take far longer to return the electrical grid to full functionality than it did in 2003. Wellinghoff said, "If you destroy the transformers—all it takes is one high-caliber bullet through a transformer case, and it's gone, you have to replace it," he said. “If there aren't spares on hand—and in the event of a coordinated attack on multiple substations, any inventory could be exhausted—it takes months to build new ones.”

"Once your electricity is out, your gasoline is out, because you can't pump the gas anymore. All your transportation's out, all of your financial transactions are out, of course because there are no electronics," Wellinghoff said.

FERC’s proposed solution is to break the system into a series of
microgrids
. In the event of a cascading failure, smaller portions of the countries can isolate themselves from the collapse of the grid. There is a precedent for this. Princeton University has an independent power grid. When a large part of the critical infrastructure collapsed during Superstorm Sandy, the Princeton campus became a place of refuge for residents, and a command center for first responders.

These doomsday scenarios may be beside the point because the electrical grid is already subject to a series of dangerous stresses from climate change. Sandy showed that the assumptions used to build many parts of the electrical grid were wrong. The storm surge overwhelmed the infrastructure, flooding substations and causing them to fail. Significant portions of the grid might need to be moved to higher ground.