War Game Exposes Lack of U.S. Cyber-Crisis CoordinationFebruary 23, 2010

 

cyber warfare

A war game involving cyber attacks against the nation's critical infrastructure underscored how the U.S. government is not prepared to respond in a coordinated and effective manner, the Washington Post reported.

The war game scenario, with participation from former high-ranking security officials from the Republican and Democratic parties, involved an attack that hijacked the cell phones and computers of millions of Americans and used them to bring down the electrical grid and the Internet.

Less than one hour into this scenario of a mock National Security Council meeting, the Post said that the attorney general declared: "We don't have the authority in this nation as a government to quarantine people's cell phones." The war game was organized by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a nonprofit group that wanted to show that a cyber attack could be as crippling as the 9/11 attacks, according to the article.

"We were trying to tee up specific issues that would be digestible so they would become the building blocks of a broader, more comprehensive cyber strategy," Michael V. Hayden, former CIA director and the principal creator of the "Cyber ShockWave" simulation, told the Post.

Sponsors, many of whom donated up to $150,000, included General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems, PayPal, Symantec, SMobile Systems, Georgetown University and Southern Co. Others, like the Chertoff Group, contributed guidance, while some, like CNN, contributed to production costs of the simulation.

The simulation, which lasted over four hours, included the following:

  • Monitors flashed maps of the United States, showing network coverage and electric power ebbing.
  • A fictional news network, GNN, covered the simulated attacks.
  • Senior administration officials watched the attacks and the ensuing crisis unfold: 40 million people without power in the eastern United States; more than 60 million cell phones out of service; and Wall Street closed for a week.

Jamie S. Gorelick, a deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton, said that Americans needed to know that they should not expect their cell phone conversations to be private during a crisis. "Not if the government is going to have to take aggressive action to tamp down the threat," she told the Post. Gorelick urged the Obama administration to seek legislation that would allow it to deal effectively with a cyber emergency.

Stewart Baker, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said that the private sector — which owns most of the infrastructure — was not prepared to defend itself against a cyber attack of the magnitude imagined by the simulation, and that the government had to play a major role in making adequate preparations to manage the gap, the Post reported.

(Bipartisan Policy Center) (RELEASED)