Simulated Cyber Attack
As we become increasingly more dependent on the Internet, the threat of cyber attacks has become a pressing concern. Dennis C Blair, the director of National Intelligence, has said to the Senate Intelligence Committee that “malicious cyber activity is occurring on an unprecedented scale with extraordinary sophistication.”
In a recent simulated cyber attack, a “March Madness” application was made available for smart phones, which was downloaded by many college basketball fans. While the users thought that they were simply following their favorite teams, their passwords were being stolen and their emails intercepted. The March Madness application hid a spyware program that could hack into these smart phones. The madness that ensued transcended the basketball games on the court. This spyware affected over 60 million cellphones and various electric grids across the nation. The simulated cyber attack was named “Cyber Shockwave.”
After the exercise, former White House advisors and other officials joined together in order to discuss the vulnerabilities of our nation’s digital infrastructure. In order to discuss such vulnerabilities, these leaders participated in a three hour simulated crisis meeting. The event was run by the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington DC. None of the panelists knew what the scenario was in advance and they were supposed to act as they would if the scenario was real. However, the results of this meeting hardly assuaged anyone’s woes of the dangers of cyber attacks. Although each advisor suggested various solutions to the fake attack, there was no overarching idea of how to prevent such an attack.
