FBI Suspects Terrorists Are Exploring Cyber Attacks

According to a WSJ report today, The FBI is looking at groups suspected of having links to al Qaeda who have shown an interest in mounting an attack on computer systems that control critical U.S. infrastructure.

While there is no evidence that terrorist groups have developed sophisticated cyber-attack capabilities yet, a lack of security protections in U.S. computer software increases the likelihood that terrorists could execute attacks in the future, an official warned.

If terrorists were to amass such capabilities, they would be wielded with “destructive and deadly intent,” Steven Chabinsky, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division, told the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday.

“The FBI is aware of and investigating individuals who are affiliated with or sympathetic to al Qaeda who have recognized and discussed the vulnerabilities of the U.S. infrastructure to cyber-attack,” Mr. Chabinsky told the committee, without providing details.

Such infrastructure could include power grids and transportation systems.

The control systems of U.S. infrastructure as well as money transfers are now connected directly or indirectly to the Internet. Hackers have been able to penetrate computer systems running components of the U.S. electric grid as well as divert bank transfers.

Read Full Article

EMP Attack Would Send America into a Dark Age

In a matter of seconds, an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack or a geomagnetic storm would send America back to the Dark Ages. It’s something few want to think about and something fewer still are doing anything about. Gale Nordling, president and CEO of Minneapolis-based Emprimus speaks to Ronald Kessler in this article from Newsmax.

An EMP attack occurs when a nuclear bomb explodes in the atmosphere. The electromagnetic pulse generated by the blast fries all electronics in line of sight. EMP was first detected after the detonation of the Starfish Prime nuclear test on July 9, 1962. While the explosion occurred near Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean and was not designed to be an EMP blast, it blew out street lamps, television sets, and telephone communications in Hawaii nearly 1,000 miles away.

A single nuclear bomb exploded over the Midwest would generate an electromagnetic pulse that would destroy the chips that are at the heart of every electronic device. While military and intelligence networks may be shielded against EMP, the rest of the country�s technological infrastructure is not.

Geomagnetic storms emanating from the sun could cause a similar catastrophe. Such a storm occurred in 1859, but because a system for distributing electric power had not yet been invented, it did not do any appreciable damage. On March 13, 1989, a minor geomagnetic storm left six million people without power in eastern Canada and the U.S. for 12 hours.

�If a nuclear device designed to emit EMP were exploded 250 to 300 miles up over the middle of the country, it would disable the electronics in the entire United States,� says Nordling, president and CEO of Minneapolis-based Emprimus. �That would disable the entire electric grid. It would disable communications, it would disable fuel manufacturing and production, it would disable hospitals and medicines, it would disable 911 call centers.�

Everything else would be shut down, Nordling says.

Read Full Article

DHS Reviewing Vulnerability in West Coast Power Grid

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is looking at a report by a research scientist in China that shows how a well-placed attack against a small power subnetwork could trigger a cascading failure of the entire West Coast power grid.

Jian-Wei Wang, a network analyst at China’s Dalian University of Technology, used publicly available information to model how the West Coast power grid and its component subnetworks are connected. Wang and another colleague then investigated how a major outage in one subnetwork would affect adjacent subnetworks, according to an article in New Scientist.

The aim of the research was to study potential weak spots on the West Coast grid, where an outage on one subnetwork would result in a cascading failure across the entire network. A cascading failure occurs when an outage on one network results in an adjacent network becoming overloaded, triggering a similar set of failures across the entire network. The massive blackouts in the Northeast in August 2003, which affected close to 10 million, were the result of such a cascading failure.

Wang’s research was expected to show that an outage in a heavily loaded network would result in smaller surrounding networks becoming overwhelmed and causing cascading blackouts. Instead, what the research showed was that under certain conditions, an attacker targeting a lightly loaded subnetwork would be able to cause far more of the grid to trip and fail, New Scientist reported quoting Wang. The article does not describe Wang’s research (paid subscription required) or any further details of the attack.

Wang did not reply to an e-mailed request for comment seeking details on the report.

Wang’s report, which appears to have been largely overlooked until the publication of the New Scientist article last week, was completed last November and has been available online since March.

Source

Electric Grid, Emergency Communications Vulnerable To EMP Weapons

Gale Nordling, president and CEO of Emprimus, recently testified before the Congressional Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, Science and Technology about how electromagnetic devices can be used against public infrastructure, specifically the electric grid. Such devices can disable systems controlled by computers and significantly disrupt emergency-response operations from fire protection to homeland security, Nordling said.

“When terrorists intentionally use electromagnetic interference they are able to interfere with security systems, communication systems and operation systems,” Nordling said in an interview with Urgent Communications.

Every year, U.S. infrastructure becomes increasingly dependent on integrated, circuit-based electronic control systems, computers and electronically stored data. As a result, Nordling said a growing use of non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse/intentional electromagnetic interference (EMP/IEMI), including radio-frequency weapons, poses a danger to the national electric grid, manufacturing control and distribution systems, corporate data and emergency-response operations. In addition, communication between first responders would be negligible because the cell and repeater towers would go down because they rely on the energy from the grid.

“It would depend on the kind of facility that would be hooked to the power grid that would determine the degree of harm that would occur, such as if it was a hospital or a 911 communication call center,” he said.

Source

EMP Attack Could Wipe Out U.S.

The federal government is doing “nothing” to protect against an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack that could wipe out American civilization, Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, a leading expert on the subject, tells Newsmax.

For only $200 million to $400 million, the government could protect a key element of the power grid to keep electrical power from being wiped out for years, according to Dr. Pry, a former staff member of the congressional Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack.

Yet neither Republicans nor Democrats have been willing to spend that small sum, says Pry, who is president EMPACT America, which is meeting in Niagara Falls, N.Y. this week to spotlight the scandal.

A single nuclear bomb exploded over the Midwest would generate an electromagnetic pulse that would destroy the chips that are at the heart of every electronic device. While military and intelligence networks may be shielded against EMP, most of the rest of the country’s technological infrastructure is not.

An EMP attack would wipe out personal computers and the internet. Cars would not start, gasoline pumps would not work, and airplanes could not take off.

Heat and air conditioning would shut down, supermarkets would have to close, telephones would go dead, water would go out, and radio and television sets would not turn on.

Banks and ATMs would shut down, credit cards would become useless, and emergency services and hospital operating rooms would close.

In the ensuing chaos, most Americans would die from starvation.

“We have a 60-day food supply in big regional warehouses,” Pry says. “Typically when hurricanes take out the electric power grid locally, that food spoils, because it needs temperature control systems and refrigerators to keep it preserved. And if you lose the electric grid across the whole country, you’re going to lose all that food that is the best hope for feeding the American people.”

The 2008 report of the congressional commission found that the country is shockingly unprepared for an EMP attack. Terrorists or countries like Iran or North Korea could launch an EMP attack and “possibly end us as a civilization, and take us out as an actor on the world stage,” Pry says.

At the least, Pry says, 100 to 200 large transformers used in electrical transmission should be protected against EMP attack.

Read Full Article

EMP A Weapon That Could Create A New Dark Age

With hurricane season upon us once again, the recent anniversary of one of the most deadly and destructive in our nation’s history — the mega-storm called Katrina — was an occasion for remembering what can happen if we are unprepared.

Unfortunately, what was arguably the most important lesson of that hurricane has still not been addressed: the truly catastrophic vulnerability of all of the infrastructures upon which our society critically depends to interruptions of the electrical grid.

Worse yet, there are both looming man-induced and far more devastating natural means of precipitating such interruptions that we have not begun to address. Should these eventuate, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will look like, well, a day at the beach.

It is no exaggeration to say that the effect of one or the other of these assaults on our electrical grid could be to engender what Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called “a world without America.”

As Katrina demonstrated, if the electricity goes off for any protracted period, a cascading ripple-effect takes down the means by which we communicate, get food and water, access financial resources, receive medical services, dispose of sewage and move from one location to another. The longer the time without electricity, the more difficult it is to bring such other infrastructures back on line.

If some of the roughly 300 transformers that are the backbone of our electrical grid are damaged or destroyed, the interruption to the electrical grid will not be brief. Today, we have few backups in place. These large and complex pieces of equipment are all produced overseas and it takes at least a year to take delivery of even one, let alone many.

William R. Graham, President Reagan’s science adviser, estimates that, if the electricity is off in large sections of America (far more than the relatively small area afflicted by Katrina) for as long as a year, the effect will not simply be on the quality of life here. He says as many as 9 in 10 of our men, women and children will die from starvation, disease and/or exposure.

via Source – Frank J. Gaffney Jr. – Washington Times.

Concerns Over Iranian Nuclear EMP Threat

Concerns about Iran’s nuclear capabilities and their potential devastating impact on America are mounting, a special report from Newsmax.TV reveals. The Islamic republic has test-fired missiles capable of reaching Israel, southeastern Europe and U.S. bases in the Mideast, and published reports say Iran is within a year of developing its own nuclear bomb.

And security experts warn that even one nuclear device in the hands of a rogue nation could be used against the United States in a devastating electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack.

So why isn’t the Obama administration doing more to prevent a nuclear nightmare?

I get very, very nervous about it,Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., told Newsmax.TV’s Kathleen Walter.I think Iran will have a nuclear weapon. I think now it’s only a question of when.

The United States is caught in the middle of a Mideast faceoff between one of its strongest allies, Israel, and Iran. Iran has threatened to wipe Israel off the world map, and Israel refuses to rule out a pre-emptive strike on its adversary while insisting that Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons.

If the United States tries to prevent Iran from making nuclear weapons, its president, Mahmoud Amedinejad, has vowed a campaign of bloody revenge.

Iran’s hatred of Israel is rooted in ideology,said Walid Phares of Foundation for Defense of Democracies.The Iranian regime is jihadist, and they do not acknowledge nor accept the idea that a non-Islamic, non-jihadist state could exist in the region.

Although Iran is thousands of miles from America’s shores, its belligerent actions could have far-reaching repercussions. A regional war or nuclear attack could cause an already shaky U.S. economy to collapse.

Even scarier, say policy analysts, is the growing threat of an EMP, an intense burst of energy from an exploding nuclear warhead high above the Earth. Experts believe such an attack could destroy all electronic devices over a massive area, from cell phones to computers to America’s electrical grid.

Within a year of that attack nine out of 10 Americans would be dead, because we can’t support a population of the present size in urban centers and the like without electricity, said Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy. That would be a world without America, as a practical matter. And that is exactly what I believe the Iranians are working towards.

President Barack Obama has committed the U.S. government to a diplomatic approach for resolving the high-stakes nuclear dispute, but Iran has so far rebuffed Obama’s overtures. Meanwhile, Congress is working on legislation to grant Obama the power to impose crippling sanctions on Iran if the talk-first approach doesn’t work.

Read Full Article

Congressman Pushes Bill To Prepare For EMP Threat

America’s electric grid is vulnerable to attack from electromagnetic weaponry, and building a smart grid might make it worse, says Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD). Bartlett, a former research scientist and engineer, offers his solution for securing U.S. electronics from attack.

“The more sophisticated we become, the more vulnerable we are,” said Bartlett. “There’s a huge concern about cyber-attacks on the grid. Well a really robust nuclear EMP lay-down means microelectronics across the country would be shut down and you have no power…there’s one event that we will not avoid, and that is a solar electromagnetic interference, solar storm. If we have a big one like the one that occurred back in 1859, that would shut down the whole grid for quite a long while. It would cost about $100 million to protect much of the grid, but if the grid went down, it would cost us between $1 trillion and $2 trillion in damages, and the loss of life could be horrendous if in fact you were without electricity for months at a time. There’s a bill in the House, and it’s got to go through the Energy and Commerce Committee.”

Read Full Article WND

Listen To NPR Interview With Congressman Bartlett

An EMP Attack, Thinking The Unthinkable – James Carafano

When the 9/11 Commission issued its report, it complained that federal agencies had a colossal “failure of imagination.” Nobody could accuse Newt Gingrich from suffering that shortfall.

When he delivered a major address on national security last week, the former Speaker of the House went after Defense Secretary Robert Gates for planning for the future the Pentagon wants, rather than dealing with the many serious problems it may actually face. Gingrich mentioned one challenge that many find too terrible to contemplate — which is why our government should spend a lot more time doing exactly that.

I’m referring to the Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP). This method of attack is usually associated with a nuclear blast. In addition to thermal, radiation, heat and concussive force, an atomic detonation throws off an incredible amount of electro-magnetic energy.

Picture a massive tsunami, but with lightning instead of water. And, like the surge produced by lightning, electrical systems act like antennas sucking down a rush of electrons that fry circuits and burn out micro-chips.

EMP is not normally addressed when talking about nuclear attack, because most nuclear strikes are planned as low-air bursts where most of the energy, EMP included, go straight into the ground (and flattening the city in-between). In such scenarios, electrical systems would be disabled by EMP, though few would notice, because most people would have been crushed or melted in the firestorm following the detonation.

A deliberate EMP attack, however, would be different. If, for example, an enemy detonated a nuclear weapon carried on a ballistic missile 200 miles or so above the earth, people on the ground might never know an attack occurred. But if the explosion happened high enough over North America, the blossom of EMP might cover the entire United States.

Read Full Article

House Panel Examines EMP, Cyber Terror Threats to Electric Grid

Legislation must allow fast action in case of physical attacks, like an EMP pulse, or cyber attacks against the electric grid, experts say

Although some have considered an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) on the nation’s electric grid unlikely, experts told a panel of the House Homeland Security Committee Tuesday that if the US completely ignores the possibility of such an attack, the possibility of an attack gets much higher.

“Some in government have taken the position that EMP attack and geomagnetic storm disruption are low-probability events…” said William Graham, chairman for the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse, a congressionally mandated commission to study the risk of EMP pulses. “By ignoring large scale, catastrophic EMP vulnerability, we invite such attack on our infrastructure by adversaries looking to attack us where we are weak, not where we are strong.”

A high-altitude EMP is the result of the detonation of a nuclear warhead at altitudes between 40-400 km above the Earth’s surface, Graham told the House Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, and Science and Technology.

“The immediate effects of EMP are disruption of, and damage to, electronic systems and electrical infrastructure,” Graham said. “EMP is not reported in the scientific literature to have direct effects on people.”

Subcommittee chairwoman Yvette Clarke (D-NY) said the risk of an EMP attack or cyber attack is a significant threat to homeland security.

“Many nation states, like Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, have offensive cyber attack capabilities, while terrorist groups like Hezbollah and al Qaeda continue to work to develop capabilities to attack and destroy critical infrastructure like the electric grid through cyber means,” Clarke said.

Homeland Security Today – preparedness and security news – House Panel Examines Threats to US Electric Grid

Electric Grid Hacked By Chinese and Russian Cyberspies

The intruders, who came from countries including China and Russia, were believed to be attempting to map the US electrical system and work out how it was controlled, according to reports in the Wall Street Journal.

Officials said the cyberspies had not tried to damage the grid, but warned they could during a crisis or war.

“The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid,” a senior intelligence official told the paper. “So have the Russians.”

The intrusion spread across the country and didn’t target any specific companies or regions, a former Department of Homeland Security official said. “There are intrusions, and they are growing,” the former official said, referring to electrical systems. “There were a lot last year.”

Source

From The Wall Street Journal

Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials.

The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven’t sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.

“The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid,” said a senior intelligence official. “So have the Russians.”

The espionage appeared pervasive across the U.S. and doesn’t target a particular company or region, said a former Department of Homeland Security official. “There are intrusions, and they are growing,” the former official said, referring to electrical systems. “There were a lot last year.”

Many of the intrusions were detected not by the companies in charge of the infrastructure but by U.S. intelligence agencies, officials said. Intelligence officials worry about cyber attackers taking control of electrical facilities, a nuclear power plant or financial networks via the Internet.

Authorities investigating the intrusions have found software tools left behind that could be used to destroy infrastructure components, the senior intelligence official said. He added, “If we go to war with them, they will try to turn them on.”

Officials said water, sewage and other infrastructure systems also were at risk.

Source