How Vulnerable is U.S. Infrastructure to a Major Cyber Attack?

• cyber warfare
• hacking
• infrastructure
• security
• Pentagon
• transportation

The next world war might not start with a bang, but with a blackout. An enemy could send a few lines of code to control computers at key power plants, causing equipment to overheat and melt down, plunging sectors of the U.S. and Canadian grid into darkness. Trains could roll to a stop on their tracks, while airport landing lights wink out and the few traffic lights that remain active blink at random.

In the silence and darkness, citizens may panic, or they may just sit tight and wait for it all to reboot. Either way, much of the country would be blind and unresponsive to outside events. And that might be the enemy’s objective: Divert America’s attention while mounting an offensive against another country.

Pentagon planners have long understood the danger of cyber attacks on U.S. military networks. Indeed, the Defense Department’s Global Information Grid is one of the most frequently targeted computer networks on Earth. But the cat-and-mouse game of information espionage on military networks is not the only digital threat that keeps national-security experts up at night. There is a growing concern over the vulnerability of far more tangible assets essential to the economy and well-being of American citizens.

Much of the critical infrastructure that keeps the country humming—water-treatment facilities, refineries, pipelines, dams, the electrical grid—is operated using a hodgepodge of technologies known as industrial control systems. Like banks and telecommunications networks, which are also generally considered critical infrastructure, these industrial facilities and utilities are owned by private companies that are responsible for maintaining their own security.

But many of the control systems in the industrial world were installed years ago with few or no cyber-security features. That wasn’t a big problem when these systems were self-contained. But in the past two decades, many of these controls have been patched into company computer networks, which are themselves linked to the Internet. And when it comes to computer security, a good rule of thumb is that any device that is computer-controlled and networked is vulnerable to hacking.

Bad-guy hackers pulling the plug on public utilities is a common theme of Hollywood films, including 2007’s Live Free or Die Hard, but such scenarios present more than a mere fictional scare to U.S. intelligence officials. According to Melissa Hathaway, cyber-coordination executive for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the list of potential adversaries in a cyber attack is long, ranging from disgruntled employees to criminals to hostile nations.

Most experts agree that China and Russia routinely probe our industrial networks, looking for information and vulnerabilities to use as leverage in any potential dispute. James Lewis, a cyber-security expert for the policy think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), says that although cyber warfare couldn’t cripple the U.S., it could serve as an effective military tactic. “If I were China, and I were going to invade Taiwan,” he says, “and I needed to complete the conquest in seven days, then it’s an attractive option to turn off all the electricity, screw up the banks and so on.” Could the entire U.S. grid be taken down in such an attack? “The honest answer is that we don’t know,” Lewis says. “And I don’t like that answer.”

Ghosts in the Machine

In January 2008, senior CIA analyst Tom Donahue dropped a bombshell on a small conference of government officials and power-company engineers from the U.S. and Europe. He told them that extortionists had managed to hack into utilities in multiple regions outside the United States and disrupt power equipment. “In at least one case,” he said, “the disruption caused a power outage affecting multiple cities.” The CIA has been highly secretive about the incident, and Donahue would not discuss where the blackouts occurred or what companies were affected. But he admitted that the CIA had no idea who had perpetrated the attacks. Hackers had shaken down a public utility, it seems, and had gotten away with it.

Some security professionals think that government officials have been guilty of as much drama-mongering on the issue as Hollywood has. “Honestly, I think the threat is overblown,” says Bruce Schneier, author of Schneier on Security. “The risks today are due more to errors than to malicious intent.” He sees Donahue’s story as nothing more than a tenebrous rumor. Nevertheless, Schneier thinks vulnerabilities in infrastructure will eventually become a real national-security threat.

The problem is that the errors that Schneier refers to can cause bad things to happen. Much of computer hacking is predicated on exploiting glitches in commonly used systems. Such exploits on a Windows PC are irritating, but at a nuclear facility, they can be unnerving.

In August 2006, a glitch shut down the Browns Ferry nuclear power plant in northern Alabama. Plant administrators lost control of recirculation pumps on one of the plant’s reactors because of excessive data traffic on the control-system network. The plant was forced to go offline temporarily.

Nuclear plants are designed to shut down in the event of major malfunctions to prevent a Chernobyl-style catastrophe. But they also generate almost 20 percent of U.S. power. What if a hacker exploited a coding error in a cooling system to shut down a sizable piece of the nation’s power supply?

Incidents of digital malfunctions that cause danger to human life are rare, but such events have happened. In June 1999, in Bellingham, Wash., shortly before a routine delivery of gasoline by the Olympic Pipe Line Co., a worker updated a database for the company’s pipeline computer-control system. According to a report by the National Transportation Safety Board, a simple typo in the database caused the system to fail, disabling remote control for the pipeline’s operators, 98 miles away in Renton, Wash. Pressure began to build in the line, so the operator issued a command to open a secondary pump to relieve it, but the system was unresponsive. A weak point in the pipeline ruptured, releasing 237,000 gal of gasoline into nearby Whatcom Creek. An hour and a half later, the gasoline ignited. The ensuing fireball scorched more than a mile of riverbank, killing three people, including two 10-year-old boys, and damaged the city’s water-treatment facility.

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