U.S. infrastructure

Cyberattack on the Infrastructure Alarms Petraeus, Coats

September 9, 2018 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

War always goes for the infrastructure: take out the bridges, cut off the electricity and water supplies. All that used to be done with artillery, tanks and bombs.

Going forward, it will be done by computers: Cyberwar.

Every day the early skirmishes — the tryout phase, if you will – are taking place. There are tens of thousands of probes of U.S. infrastructure by potential enemies, known and unknown, state and non-state. A few get through the defenses.

Jeremy Samide, chief executive officer of Stealthcare, a company which seeks to improve cyberdefenses for a diverse set of U.S. companies, sees the cyber battlefield starkly. He says the threat is very real; and he puts the threat of serious attack at 83 percent.

Jeremy Samide is chief executive officer of Stealthcare.

As Samide looks out across the United States from his base in Cleveland, he sees probes, the term of art for incoming cyberattacks, like an endless rain of arrows. Some, he says, will get through and the infrastructure is always at risk.

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats issued a warning in July that the alarms for our digital infrastructure are “blinking.” He compared the situation to that in the country before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The situation, he told the Hudson Institute in a speech, is “critical.” Coats singled out Russia as the most active of the probers of U.S. infrastructure.

Samide says probing can come from anywhere and Russia may be the most active of the cyber adventurers.

A common scenario, he says, is that the electric grid is target one. But considerable devastation could come from attacking banking, communications, transportation or water supply.

Retired Army Gen. David Petraeus, a former director of the CIA and current chairman of KKR Global Institute, in an article coauthored with Kiran Sridhar and published in Politico on Sept. 5, urges the creation of a new government agency devoted to cybersecurity.

Samide and others endorse this and worry that the government has much vital material spread across many agencies and not coordinated. Behind Petraeus’s thinking is one of the lessons of 9/11: Government departments aren’t good at sharing information.

Conventional wisdom has it that the electric grid is super-vulnerable. But Politico’s cybersecurity reporter David Perera, who consulted experts on the feasibility of taking down the grid, somewhat demurs. In a Politico article, he concluded that the kind of national blackout often theorized isn’t possible because of the complexity of the engineering in the grid and its diversity.

The difficulty, according to Perera, is for the intruder to drill down into the computer-managed engineering systems of the grid and attack the programable controllers, also known as industrial control systems — the devices which run things, like moving load, closing down a power plant or shutting off the fuel supply. They are automation’s brain.

Perera’s article has been read by some as getting the utilities off the hook. But it doesn’t do that: Perera’s piece is not only well-researched and argued but also warns against complacency and ignoring the threat.

John Savage, emeritus professor of computer science at Brown University, says, “I perceive that the risk to all business is not changing very much. But to utilities, it is rising because it appears to be a new front in [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s campaign to threaten Western interests. While I doubt that he would seek a direct conflict with us, he certainly is interested in making us uncomfortable. If he miscalculates, the consequences could be very serious.”

Samide warns against believing that all probes are equal in intent and purpose. He says there are various levels of probing from surveillance (checking on your operation) to reconnaissance (modeling your operation before a possible attack). Actual attacks, ranging from the political to the purely criminal, include ransomware attacks or the increasing cryptojacking in which a hacker hijacks a target’s processing power in order to mine cryptocurrency on the hacker’s behalf.

The threats are global and increasingly the attribution — the source of the attack — concealed. Other tactics, according to Samide, include misdirection: a classic espionage technique for diverting attention from the real aim of the attack.

The existential question is if cyberwar goes from low-grade to high-intensity, can we cope? And how effective are our countermeasures?

Today’s skirmishes are harbingers of the warfighting of the future. — For InsideSources

The Case for Fixing Up America

April 27, 2012 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

I’m asked with some frequency these days, what do I think the United States will look like in 25 years to 50 years? Underlying this question is a real concern that we’ve lost our way as a nation, that the best is behind us and a strong feeling that the generations to come won’t have it as good as we’ve had.

Actually, I think the United States will be fine. It’ll still be a world power, but not as dominant as it is today and was in the 20th century. I think we’ll still have one of the largest and most important economies in the world; that we’ll still be a powerhouse of invention; and that ourmovies, music and other entertainment forms will still dominate the globe.

American English will continue to be the international means of communication. Sorry Britain, there’s no license fee on language.

A rosy picture, eh? Not quite.

The second, and maybe the more important question, is what sort of country will the United States be to live in? This picture is less rosy.

First, we’re dividing into a country of the super rich and the burgeoning working poor living unpleasantly. The movement of quality manufacturing jobs in the auto and steel industries to the South tells part of that story. The high-wage jobs of Michigan and the unionized North — jobs that pay about $35 an hour — to the union-free auto plants and factories of the South, which pay $14 an hour, is a harbinger of the future. Can less be more?

If the United States is going to have told hold down its wages, then we should fix the living space; that means the infrastructure. It’s a mess and it’ll take decades to bring it up to the standards of much of the rest of the world.

We need better roads (less time in traffic), repaired bridges, sewers, water systems and public transportation. We also should fix the parks — state and national — and build pedestrian areas where we can enjoy the great natural beauty of our rivers and woodlands. London and Paris and Vienna make their rivers places of beauty and recreation. New York runs highways along its rivers — highways where it should have cafes. Los Angeles has enclosed its streams in concrete.

London has refurbished Brunel's masterpiece of design St. Pancras railway station to accommodate the new 200-mph trains that will whisk you to Paris in a little over two hours. Both the station and the trains are great achievements; achievements that can be enjoyed by traveler and visitor alike.

By contrast Union Station in Washington, D.C., a masterpiece in its day, is a mess. The tracks are inadequate. The station seating is inadequate, broken and mostly an afterthought. The restrooms are inadequate and dirty. The majesty of the station has been destroyed by tawdry retailers and half-finished repairs. Decay permeates the place — maybe to prepare the passengers for the disreputable taxis outside.

What an introduction to the capital of the free world. However, if you’ve just arrived on Amtrak, you might already be so dispirited you won't notice.

Likewise, the nation's schools need to be renovated. Leaky buildings seem more designed to prepare students for a lifetime of failure and decline than for a life of pride and accomplishment. “We make buildings and they make us,” Winston Churchill said.

The case for fixing the nation's infrastructure is compelling. But it does not compel in Congress. Congress is hell-bent to hurt the infrastructure with cost cutting-measures that will — as has happened in Britain and Spain — as likely as not add to the deficit rather than reducing it.

A more believable use of the government's resources might be to start fixing America by diverting some of the defense budget to sprucing up and repairing the nation, yielding results in a time frame of 25 to 50 years.

The story of another Churchill saying goes like this:

Churchill was walking in the garden of his beloved home, Chartwell, when he summoned the gardener and said, “I want you to plant an oak tree here.”

The gardener, looking to Churchill and seeing a man approaching 90, said, “But sir, it’ll take a hundred years to grow.”

“Well, you had better plant it now, hadn't you?” averred Churchill.

Quite so. The future awaits. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Next Big Idea: An Infrastructure Bank

June 9, 2011 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

The late, great senator from New York Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to lament that Americans had lost the courage for big projects like the one he championed for the lower West Side of Manhattan, Westway. He wondered what had happened to the civic courage that allowed the building of the Erie Canal, the Hoover Dam (a giant jobs project), the transcontinental railroads and the Interstate Highway System.

And his lament was when we could still afford to build big things.

Civic timorousness has now been joined by fiscal constraint. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has canceled a project to build a much-needed new tunnel from his state into Manhattan. A station on a new subway line between Dulles Airport in Virginia and Washington, D.C. hangs in the balance, as local jurisdictions throw up their hands at the cost. The issue is whether a less-costly station above ground should replace a planned, underground station in the airport terminal. High speed rail was rejected in Florida ostensibly over cost fears.

But it is the lack of big projects, in a time of financial crisis, that are beginning to threaten the competitiveness of America’s future.

Our infrastructure — once the envy of the world — is in deplorable shape, and declining faster than it is being rejuvenated: airports, bridges, canals, passenger rail, ports, roads, sewage and water systems are all falling apart.

In short, America seems broken. And those things that are not yet broken, like the air traffic control system and the electric grid, are showing signs of mortal strain.

An additional blow to infrastructure has been the zeal of Congress in getting rid of earmarks; a funding device that, at its best, when done openly, directed some miniscule parts of the federal budget to places where the infrastructure was strained to breaking, or simply did not exist.

Because it was abused in the middle of the night, with dollars going to dubious projects and firms, Congress has, to quote Sen. John Kerry (D –Mass,) “thrown the baby out with the bathwater.”

Against this background of impotence, brought on by budget paralysis, there is a stirring in Washington among academics, some politicians (particularly Kerry and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) who have introduced a bill), the think-tanks, the craft unions and the columnists — in short, the establishment — that there should be an infrastructure bank, a public-private partnership bank, devoted to the long-term (up to 45 years) financing of infrastructure projects.

The idea, as espoused by panelists at a recent meeting on Capitol Hill, representing interests from the construction contractors, financiers like The Carlyle Group, to the AFL-CIO, is that the bank would make direct loans, guarantee private-sector loans, and verify the creditworthiness of projects that could be financed by the private sector on favorable terms with guarantees from the bank against default. Robert Dove of The Carlyle Group beamed when he described a model project of public-private cooperation along highways in Connecticut.

Although it is very unpopular to say in Washington that anything in Europe works, the model for an American bank might well be the highly successful European Investment Bank with a nod to the Export-Import Bank of the United States, a successful public-private financial partnership.

Whether the bank is the institution proposed by Kerry and Hutchison, talk of an infrastructure bank that would create jobs and help reverse years of infrastructure decay will be coming to a town hall near you soon.

The concept of “infrastructure” is vague, but the word “jobs” is a powerful political opiate. And there are plenty of sound-bite-friendly statistics, such as one from the American Society of Civil Engineers that says that it will take $2 trillion over five years to restore the U.S. infrastructure, or that we spend less than 2 percent of our Gross Domestic Product on fixing up the country while China is spending 9 percent.

No wonder Kerry gets misty-eyed when he talks about the shame he feels at riding the fastest train in the world in China or of sliding from London to Paris in two hours and 15 minutes with his cell phone and computer plugged in.

— For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate