JULY 31, 2016
But it’s not Russian hackers you should be worried about.
Greetings from the front. The cyberwar continues. Our operatives continue to hit infrastructure targets around the globe. In June alone we conducted 44 ops, hitting targets in 26 U.S. states and six countries total. Each operation impacted as many 15,000 people and lasted for up to four and half hours. Of course that’s just our unclassified operations; the actual number of power outages our operatives have caused is 10 times that number.
As we continue to wreak havoc on your electric infrastructure, your policymakers and cyberwar hawks are rattling sabers, worried about online attacks from nation-states, completely ignoring the threats that successfully target your power grid every day. The Washington Post, Forbes, USA Today, and even the esteemed Ted Koppel talk about “cybergeddon,” trillion-dollar risks, and when — not if — a massive cyberattack on the U.S. electric power grid will occur. Even President Obama is worried. In the meantime, we quietly go about our work, disrupting power generation and transmission across the globe.
To date there has been exactly one, just one, power outage that can be attributed to some sort of cyberattack by a nation-state. Last December, someone (many people say directed by the Russian government, but there really isn’t enough evidence to support that accusation) hit up to six different power companies in Ukraine with a coordinated malware and DDoS attack. This definitely wasn’t a random lone hacker in a basement; this took months of planning and coordinated effort. It sounds scary but the outages only lasted a few hours and affected around 80,000 residences. We have caused far bigger and longer outages all by ourselves.
