United States' Critical Infrastructure at Risk

In reading professionally about our critical infrastructure's vulnerabilities to cyberattacks, I was not at all surprised by the announcement yesterday, Russia is Hacking into Nuclear Power Plants and other Critical Infrastructure. We've known about Russia, China, North Korea (and some of our allies) probing our critical infrastructures. The news part of this was the very public announcement and details released by the Department of Homeland Security.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, the Center for Regional Disaster Resilience (CRDR) in partnership with business, industry and governments has been working on the cybersecurity issue for years. There have been annual workshops for around six years, and the first large-scale Blue Cascades Cybersecurity Exercise II was in 2004. The majority, not all, of the cybersecurity activites have been funded by the King County Critical Infrastructure Workgroup, which has recognized the threat and how it continues to change and become more deadly and disruptive. The most recent attacks are coming from the use of Internet of Things (IoT), which are quickly going to dominate our commercial and personal functioning. 

I believe that the only thing really protecting us is the "mutually assured disruption" since the United States also has an offensive capability, which has kept national actors from executing on their capabilities to take down our infrastructure.  

As I have argued for project funding for cybersecurity readiness, I remind people that this threat is real today, and it is not going away in our lifetime or that of our children and grandchildren. It is a hazard we will be living with for the foreseeable future.