24 JUN 16 – Executive Intelligence Summary

by Sam Culper

PIR1: What are the current indicators of systems disruption that could lead to a SHTF event?

Critical Infrastructure

If America experiences an SHTF event in the next year, my money is on a cyber attack. Tracking these events, even I’ve been amazed at just how dire our vulnerabilities are. I don’t think we see strength in any particular sector; the power grids, SCADA systems in critical infrastructure, and the financial sector all face very grave threats.  This is a high-risk game. We’re by no means ‘wide open’, but I have little faith that we can successfully defend against a determined cyber adversary. And I have less faith in society to react appropriately to systems disruption on a wide scale.

This month, U.S. Cyber Command spent nine days during a “cyber 9/11” exercise which pitted them against a near-peer adversary like Russia or China. Although slated for full operational capability by the end of 2016, CyberCom won’t be fully operational until at least 2018.  And still only half of CyberCom is at initial operating capacity. Think of it this way: half of CyberCom is barely walking in the crawl-walk-run spectrum. And from what little open source reporting was available from this exercise, I didn’t gather that CyberCom exactly hit a home run.

Another point of contention is that CyberCom’s domain often overlaps with privately-owned infrastructure. There could very well be a battle between corporate cybersecurity and government cybersecurity personnel over who has control of that infrastructure. That’s going to be a very gray area, and ultimately it’s going to lead to a national emergency in which government will take control of anything it wants. We can still argue about which parts of the Constitution are generally being upheld, but a sustained, major cyber attack is going to be a Constitution killer.

Based on what I’ve seen so far this year, we should absolutely be preparing for surviving in a grid-down environment. The overall likelihood is low; this is not an imminent event, but it’s a very high-risk situation. And we’re in the prelude to war against adversaries who can do it.

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There are four more PIRs covered in Sam Culper’s latest Executive Intelligence Summary. The content is for subscriber’s only. I strongly urge everyone to subscribe to this site.

David DeGerolamo