This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

In 2012, government-backed Iranian hacking teams infiltrated the world’s biggest oil company, Saudi Aramco, destroying computers, scrubbing data, and leaving behind the image of a burning American flag. They then targeted major American banks by flooding their websites with junk traffic until the sites crashed in “denial of service” attacks. Next, the hacking teams took out the systems of Sands casino chain in retaliation for the owner’s incendiary remarks to Israeli leaders. 

Similarly, North Korea attacked Sony Pictures to protest its new film release: a movie depicting the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jon-un. The attack destroyed 70% of the movie studio’s computers and caused many theaters to refuse to show the movie. The North Koreans also leaked emails from private Sony Pictures accounts to the media, causing a major scandal for the company. In 2015, President Barack Obama negotiated agreements with both Iran and China, successfully curbing cyberattacks on America by two of the main perpetrators. Unfortunately, these ententes did not long outlast the duration of Obama’s presidency.

In 2012, the Department of Homeland Security discovered that the power grid of the United States was being infiltrated and mapped out by Russian hackers. In time, Russian hacking groups penetrated all manner of digital infrastructure, including gas suppliers and water systems. With a Trojan-horse style infiltration of a Microsoft update in 2014, they also infiltrated industrial control centers for dams and nuclear facilities all across the country. These actions were made possible because Congress had blocked any bill aiming to regulate critical infrastructure or hold it to federal standards of security. Because of this decision, which had left the nation vulnerable, Russia now had the ability to cause major disasters that could easily cause massive casualties and disrupt the American way of life; there was no preparedness plan capable of dealing with the aftermath. 

In the field of information security, the concept of an attack on digital infrastructure like the power grid had long been seen as unrealistic fear-mongering, but in this moment, it became a real threat. Perlroth discussed the issue with Watters, who by this point was running a private counterintelligence company called iSight, which aimed to function as an early warning system for major clients. He agreed that Russian attacks on Ukraine—including the six-hour blackout caused in the Ivano-Frankivsk region in 2015—were tests for a potential attack on America and a deliberate threat to show what Russians were capable of.