{"id":2623,"date":"2019-05-24T22:58:56","date_gmt":"2019-05-24T22:58:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blackopspartners.com\/?p=2623"},"modified":"2019-05-24T22:58:56","modified_gmt":"2019-05-24T22:58:56","slug":"cyberattacks-are-the-newest-frontier-of-war-and-can-strike-harder-than-a-natural-disaster-heres-why-the-us-could-struggle-to-cope-if-it-got-hit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blackopspartners.com\/cyberattacks-are-the-newest-frontier-of-war-and-can-strike-harder-than-a-natural-disaster-heres-why-the-us-could-struggle-to-cope-if-it-got-hit\/","title":{"rendered":"Cyberattacks are the newest frontier of war and can strike harder than a natural disaster. Here’s why the US could struggle to cope if it got hit."},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Imagine waking up one day and feeling as if a hurricane hit \u2014 except everything is still standing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The lights are out, there is no running water, you have no phone signal, no internet, no heating or air conditioning. Food starts rotting in your fridge, hospitals struggle to save their patients, trains and planes are stuck. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are none of the collapsed buildings or torn-up trees that accompany a hurricane, and no floodwater. But, all the same, the world you take for granted has collapsed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is what it would look like if hackers decided to take your country offline. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Business Insider has researched the state of cyberwarfare, and spoken with experts in cyberdefense, to piece together what a large-scale attack on a country like the US could look like. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nowadays nations have the ability to cause warlike damage to their enemy’s vital infrastructure without launching a military strike, helped along by both new offensive technology and the inexorable drive to connect more and more systems to the internet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What makes infrastructure systems so vulnerable is that they exist at the crossroads between the digital world and the physical world, said Andrew Tsonchev, the director of technology for the cyberdefense firm Darktrace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Computers increasingly control operational technologies that were previously in the hands of humans \u2014 whether the systems that route electricity through power lines or the mechanism that opens and closes a dam. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
“These systems have been connected up to the Wild West of the internet, and there are exponential opportunities to break in to them,” Tsonchev said. This creates a vulnerability experts say is especially acute in the US. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most US critical infrastructure is owned by private businesses, and the state does not incentivize them to prioritize cyberdefense, according to Phil Neray, an industrial cybersecurity expert for the firm CyberX. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
“For most of the utilities in the US that monitoring is not in place right now,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of the most obvious vulnerabilities experts identify is the power grid, relied upon by virtually everyone living and working in a developed country. <\/p>\n\n\n\n