It's the week before Christmas, the busiest traveling season of the year for American
airlines.
All across the nation travelers are making their way home for the holidays, and millions
of Americans are currently either in the air or waiting their turn to board their next
flight.
Somewhere in the American midwest, a family approaches a check-in counter to get their
boarding passes, but as the ticket agent checks their names in the online passenger registry,
there's a mistake- the family's names simply aren't there.
The family, now growing worried, shows the ticket agent their email receipt, along with
a confirmation number.
The agent checks the number, which rings true, except the passengers assigned that number
aren't the ones currently asking to receive their boarding passes.
Two ticket counters down, the same mistake is happening, and at another airline yet another
family and ticket agent are going through the same issue.
Inside the airport proper itself, TSA agents are checking boarding passes and passenger
IDs.
As one of the TSA agents swipes a passenger's boarding pass he's surprised to discover that
this middle-aged mother of three is on the government's official no-fly list.
Even more troubling, she's actually been listed as wanted by government agencies for making
terror threats.
The suburbian mother of three is led away in handcuffs, bewildered and proclaiming her
innocence, as her family is held in a separate holding area by airport security.
Fifteen minutes later another passenger is flagged as no-fly, and also as wanted for
making terror threats- this time an elderly man of 75.
In another terminal, the exact same scenario is playing out, and then repeating itself
in a second airport a few hundred miles away.
The FAA, responsible for all civilian air traffic in the US, very quickly realizes that
something is wrong.
What started as an isolated incident in a remote midwest airport has quickly spread
across the nation.
Now hundreds, and soon thousands, of passengers have been falsely flagged as no-fly'ers, or
as wanted for making terror threats.
Tens of thousands of travelers are having their boarding passes denied due to what seems
to be computer error.
Within the next hour that number will double.
An emergency alert reaches the offices of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security,
and the Department of Defense's US Cyber Command nearly simultaneously.
Within minutes the president's been alerted- American domestic airlines and airports have
been targeted by a massive cyber attack, and even more troubling is the fact that they
seem to have penetrated the report and alerting systems of the Department of Homeland Security
itself.
Lacking a centralized cyber command structure, the US government reels as it tries to coordinate
a response to the attack amidst the busiest traveling season of the year, each cyber agency
pursuing its own agenda.
Inside a gas-fired power plant deep in Minnesota, a few dozen lines of malicious code knock
the temperature monitoring and control and the gas injection systems of the gas turbines
offline.
Unknown to the plant's operators, more gas is being mixed into the stream of air that
enters the turbine, causing larger combustion events.
Just a few minutes later the first turbine explodes, critically damaging its neighbors,
which very quickly go offline as well.
Across a corner of Minnesota, thousands of homes lose power, and along with their power-
their heating as well.
The icy chill of a below zero Minnesota winter grips the occupants of the affected homes
as the gas plant operators survey the wreckage- the plant's four gas turbines are completely
destroyed, it will take weeks before the plant is back online.
Similar events begin to occur in natural gas power plants around the country, all in rapid
succession.
Whoever has perpetrated this cyber attack knows that they have to move quickly, or else
their malicious code can be automatically discovered and fixed by vigilant cyber security
tools.
Forty five percent of the US's natural gas plants- all of them lacking critical security
updates to software- are knocked offline, causing approximately 16% of the nation to
lose power.
Along with power, millions of homes have now lost heating as well, and all this in the
grip of the middle of winter.
In the skies above a United States caught in the grip of a cyber-Pearl Harbor, an airliner
filled with 187 passengers experiences what seems to be an instrument malfunction.
Descending for a landing through turbulent winter weather, the plane is using its precision
approach and landing system to 'see' digitally through the terrible exterior conditions.
Breaking through the clouds and icy fog, the pilots are horrified to discover that the
GPS signals they've been relying on to guide their descent have been inaccurate by several
hundred feet.
The pilots struggle to bring the plane up out of its descent, but conditions on the
ground were so terrible that the plane only got a good visual on the ground from barely
a thousand feet up.
With a fiery explosion, an entire passenger liner goes up in flames.
Similar incidents are happening across the nation, though thankfully weather is clear
enough for pilots to correct their descents in the majority of cases.
Only two other planes are lost due to the mysterious glitch- though a corruption of
a plane's navigation systems causes one other airliner to fly out into the Atlantic ocean,
believing itself to still be on approach to airports on the east coast.
By the time the mistake is discovered by the crew it is too late, and the plane does not
have the fuel needed to return to the mainland.
Coast guard vessels are dispatched in advance, though none believe anyone will survive the
crash into stormy winter seas.
In the waters of the Gulf of Mexico though, almost two thousand oil platforms are pumping
away twenty four hours a day, bringing tens of thousands of barrels of oil to the surface
from deep beneath the sea.
Hundreds of these platforms are struck simultaneously with malicious code similar to the type used
to attack American natural gas plants.
Pressure sensors are disabled, and as the wells continue to pump unchecked, hundreds
of them suffer catastrophic bursts or breaks in their piping.
Millions of gallons of oil begin to spill unchecked into the American gulf, causing
the worst maritime ecological disaster in human history.
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill would eventually release 4.9 million barrels of oil into the
environment- but this massive disaster will end up releasing over triple that amount before
the last of the wellhead breeches are sealed in the following weeks.
Marine life in the Gulf of Mexico will die in record numbers, and the federal government,
along with the government of Mexico and other Central and Southern American nations issue
a decade-long moratorium on fishing in an effort to allow the Gulf's dwindling wildlife
to restore itself.
The economic damage to the United States from the fishing moratorium will run into the hundreds
of billions over the course of the ten-year ban, though more immediately with 17% of US
oil production coming from the Gulf, the disaster will skyrocket global oil prices and force
the United States to rely much more heavily on foreign oil.
This inevitably drives the United States even closer to a Saudi Arabia that it has been
trying to distance itself from for the last decade over the nation's human rights abuses
record, and Saudi Arabia in turn uses the opportunity to strike out at its regional
rival- Iran.
The US and Iran are thus perched on the precipice of a new war, secretly being manipulated by
the Saudi government which is blackmailing the US into doing its dirty work for it.
Just twenty four hours after the start of what is now being officially called Cyber
Pearl Harbor, casualties are already streaming into hospital emergency rooms due to the effect
of extreme cold on millions of Americans left without power or heating.
The first casualties are the very young and elderly, yet as the days carry on more and
more Americans will need medical attention as they're forced to endure extreme cold winter
temperatures.
With a massive interruption to US oil production, the diesel generators that hospitals in the
affected areas are relying on to operate are starting to run out of what is very quickly
becoming expensive fuel.
The US military is dispatched to assist in humanitarian missions across the affected
areas, and the strategic oil reserve is tapped for the first time in over a decade.
For many though it will be too late, and tens of thousands of the most vulnerable- the sick,
the elderly, and the young, have already succumbed to the cold.
To make matters worse, the attack against airport cyber infrastructure has stranded
one hundred thousand travelers in airports all across the US.
Unable to verify the identity of individuals digitally, a painstaking analog method must
be implemented as travel reservations and flight clearances are sorted.
Hundreds of planes have been grounded though due to the attack on navigation systems, and
some airlines have seen their entire fleet grounded pending emergency fixes.
The fixes will take time though, and it will be weeks before the US's air fleet is once
more in the sky in force.
The stranded travelers will themselves take a week or more to make their way home, further
adding to the strain on communities rocked by the gas plant attacks and an economy nose-diving
from the disruption of oil production in the American gulf.
Just two days later, an attack on the nation's financial systems brings down banking services
across eighteen percent of the US's banks.
Wall Street panics as the nation comes under attack and stock prices plummet.
Fortunes are lost overnight, and blue-chip companies such as Microsoft and Apple take
losses in the hundreds of millions.
A new Great Depression dawns on America as panicked Americans rush to banks and withdraw
their money, collapsing the national banking system.
The previous scenario is clearly fictional, but it is a picture of what may possibly be
in store for America- or another nation- as the world becomes ever more dependent on digital
infrastructure.
For now an attack on such a massive scale, targeting so many different digital networks,
would be impossible, as such an attack would require the coordination of a vast array of
cyber assets and the development of an equal number of specialized cyberweapons.
Neither of those two could be carried out by any nation without the intelligence services
of another nation discovering it.
Famously, the US and Israel's Stuxnet virus attacks against Iran's nuclear program were
many times nearly discovered by accident, and that was only a single cyber weapon and
a single offensive cyber operation.
For now the previous scenario remains in the realm of fantasy, but the grim reality is
that such an event is extremely possible in the very near future, and the consequences
would be just as disastrous as those in our hypothetical cyber Pearl Harbor- if not worse.
For almost eight decades the world has kept its precarious balance on the edge of nuclear
war thanks to the concept of MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction.
In essence MAD is boiled down to, 'if you fire your nukes I will detect it and fire
off my nukes'.
Since nobody likes having nuclear weapons rain down on their heads, nobody ever fired
off an ICBM at their enemy.
Yet cyber weapons are far more subtle, and difficult to detect, than a nuclear weapon.
By their very nature they can make it difficult to even discover who launched an attack in
the first place after one takes place.
This can embolden nations, or even individuals and terrorist groups, to launch ambitious
attacks in order to subvert their foes.
In fact, the seeds of such an attack have already been planted around the world, and
it is well known that Russian agents have penetrated the systems of many US power plants-
with the United States having returned the favor in kind.
In a recent testimony to congress, a Department of Defense official stated that the cyber
realm is the only warfighting domain that the US does not enjoy a large advantage in.
Here the United State's defensive and offensive capabilities are pretty much on par with those
of China, Russia, and even Iran.
To make matters worse, nearly a quarter of all cyber security jobs in the US are unfilled
due to a lack of qualified candidates, and those that are filled often times have individuals
who are not qualified for the job.
Clearly the US is vulnerable to such a cyber Pearl Harbor, and the fear today and for our
foreseeable future remains, what if someone becomes bold enough to attempt the attack?
Do you think a digital Pearl Harbor is inevitable?
Should the US be spending more on cyber security?
Let us know in the comments!
And if you enjoyed this video then check out how the US attacked Iran digitally in The
Virus That Saved The World From Nuclear Iran.
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