Cyber ShockWave Aftermath: Is the U.S. Ready for a Cyber-Attack?

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A simulated exercise titled “Cyber ShockWave” held by the Bipartisan Policy Center took place yesterday, February 16 at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, D.C.  The exercise was a simulated cyber-attack on the United States to see how well members of the government would respond to a large-scale cyber-attack on the nation's critical infrastructure.  The participants were a group of former national security and administration officials from both the Democratic and Republican Party.

The Cyber ShockWave scenario began with a massive interruption with cell phone communications due to malicious software known as bots. A bot is a compromised computer or device running software that allows a remote computer to control it or at times can run on it own with preprogrammed instructions.  The bots were installed on many cell phones from the attraction of a free NCAA March Madness cell phone app users installed.  Once installed, the cell phone bot started a series of malicious activities including financial hacking and the constant download of videos, ultimately clogging the cell phone networks until 600-million cell phone practically became useless.  The bots also traversed over to personal computing system when these cell phones were synced with computers.  The personal computer would obtain a copy of the cell phone bot code once the syncing process took place and eventually, Internet Service Providers began to suffer the same circumstances as the cell phone network.  The bots then continued to flood both the cell phone network and Internet Service Providers to a crawl, thus rendering communications to a halt.  

Furthermore, if that wasn’t enough, the electrical grid in many areas on the eastern part of the country has shutdown and more areas were at risk of going out due to a series of event that includes a bomb, extreme heat wave and a hurricane.  All this sounds like an interesting episode of “24”.

The participants learned some of the latest developments from a fake news channel called “GNN” as they worked together in their respected areas to handle the crisis.  

In conclusion, the results of the exercise displayed the U.S. government is not ready and would not be ready for a large-scale cyber crisis.  Eileen McMenamin, vice president of communications at the Bipartisan Policy Center stated, "The general consensus of the panel today was that we are not prepared to deal with these kinds of attacks."

The hardest part in any form of cyber-attack is trying to identify whom the attackers are and who to hold accountable.  That has been the situation with the recent attack on Google’s network and a thought also shared by Othniel Alphonse, a security technician and the host of “The Tech Talk Show” based in Washington D.C.  “It seemed the group participating in the simulated attack burned a lot of cycles trying to find out who initiated the attack with very little success, that wasted a lot of valuable time.”   

At the end, some useable lessons were taken from the exercise that should help government officials when faced with such a crisis in the future.  The exercise should also aid in the form of creating and/or reworking policy to assist government officials with better decision-making options.
 
Members of the press including CNN were invited to view and record the exercise live.  The events of the simulated attack will be broadcast on CNN as a special program the weekend of February 20.

Cyber ShockWave is being funded by General Dynamics, Georgetown University, SMobile Systems, Southern Company and PayPal.