Group Simulates Cyber Attack
Intelligence experts playing a cyber war game Tuesday to test America's readiness for a nationwide hack faced a simulated crisis that crippled America's power grid - trouble that started with a cell phone virus.
With help from former CIA Director Michael Hayden, the Bipartisan Policy Institute arranged a situation room challenge where experts such as former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and former Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte found there were a limited number of existing strategies to respond to widespread cyber terrorism.
"Our hope in staging this exercise is that we can create public awareness of what the American people thinks, what the government thinks and what the private sector thinks, because they are going to have to deal with these issues," the center's spokeswoman Eileen McMenamin said.
The role-playing game took place in an alternate 2011, when hackers distribute a free phone application containing a virus, which lets them trace every key stroke including passwords and financial transactions. This leads to financial confusion and widespread abandonment of smart phones, which overloads conventional computer servers with extra traffic. On top of losses from the hacks, lack of trust in smart phone products costs the Internet consumer market $3 billion in two weeks alone.
And it gets worse. The summer of 2011 is one of the hottest on record, straining the cooling stations for power grids, complicated by a hurricane on the Gulf Coast that damages the natural gas infrastructure. With added strain from a terrorist bombing at a power station, key corridors of the power grid fail and leave millions without electricity.
The situation room had to act fast to advise the president on how to deal with the perfect storm of cyber troubles. In the end, the team posing as the presidential Cabinet declared martial law to maintain order. Chertoff compared the event to the real meetings of the National Security Council that he and many other panelists had sat on in the Bush administration.
"To a surprising degree you learn the greatest issue in the meetings is not the capability or the result you want to achieve but are you allowed to do these things?" Chertoff said. "That's why you want to surface the legal and policy issues up front."
Matthew Stern, director of cyber accounts for General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems, one of the event's sponsors, said it was designed to be plausible but easy for audiences to understand without too much focus on technical details.
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Cybersecurity
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