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

by Nicole Perlroth

For years the military and intelligence officials warned Congress that a foreign nation or rogue hacker could exploit software holes and access points to take down the substations that power Silicon Valley, the NASDAQ, or a swing county’s voting systems on Election Day. In 2010 a bipartisan group of ten former national security, intelligence, and energy officials—including former secretaries of defense James Schlesinger and William Perry, former CIA directors R. James Woolsey and John Deutsch, and former White House national security advisors Stephen Hadley and Robert McFarlane—sent a confidential letter to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce in support of a bill to improve the cybersecurity of America’s critical infrastructure. Their letter was blunt: “Virtually all of our civilian critical infrastructure—including telecommunications, water, sanitation, transportation, and health care—depend on the electric grid. The grid is extremely vulnerable to disruption caused by a cyber or other attack. Our adversaries already have the capability to carry out such an attack. The consequences of a large-scale attack on the U.S. grid would be catastrophic for our national security and economy.” It went on: “Under current conditions, timely reconstitution of the grid following a carefully targeted attack if particular equipment is destroyed would be impossible; and according to government experts, would result in widespread outages for at least months to two years or more, depe...