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| It can be argued that the dimensions of the human soul are 2.12" by 3.36" since those are the dimensions of the portal-to-debt-hell. |
I misplaced my only credit card in early December. I did not notice for a while.
I kept an eagle's eye on my on-line statements and nothing unexpected showed up.
After two weeks, Mrs ERJ suggested that I report the card as missing.
That also impacted the card she uses for grocery shopping.
I have an ATM card but am loath to share that information with merchants. Somehow, I feel more vulnerable when the money is yanked out of my account; possession being 9/10ths of ownership. I have one more degree of separation with a credit card. If I am in dispute of a transaction, I can delay paying while the issue is being resolved.
If the US stock-market tanks in 2022, it is probably all my fault.
Six Nuclear Targets
There were endless links to an article(s) in the doomer-press about which cities were most at-risk for nuclear attack. Estimates of fatalities were breathlessly reported.
To me, they had the odor of fighting the last war. They focused on population and a little bit on infrastructure. If there is one lesson you take away from WWII and the Maginot Line it is that betting that the next war will be a simple continuation of the last one is a great way to lose and lose quickly.
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| Server-farms or data-centers look like this. Basically, old K-marts filled with servers (computers) and a million miles of cable. |
It is my gut-feel that there is a much greater probability of an attack by a proxy . That is, a for-hire agent and not the true enemy. My gut-feel is the attack will use conventional munitions and will target mega-data centers and Silicon Valley campuses.
Las Vegas, Reno and Washington D.C. are home to the largest data-centers in the US. Washington D.C. and Silicon Valley are chip-shots for ballistic missiles with 1965 technology and Vegas/Reno and the data-centers in West Virginia (servers demand cooling that is incredibly energy intensive and energy is cheap in WV) are comfortably within range from the ocean with Iranian exported Zolfaghar missiles.
The facilities may be hardened but having multiple 1000 pound HE warheads dropped on top of them will leave a mark. Unlike nukes, conventional weapons are much less easy to trace. There are just SO MANY of them available for cash-on-the-barrelhead. Does anybody doubt that this kind of attack, launched from CONEX containers on freighters, is beyond the reach of even the meanest, 3rd-World country?
Given that tech companies have been the tent-poles holding up the Standard & Poor 500 valuations and given that "data" is the means used by the government to force compliance...scrambling the data-centers will pop the stock-market bubble and shoot the horse out from beneath the government.
Furthermore, Just-in-Time inventory is data intensive. Remove cyber communication and the economy hits a brick wall. There is no need for the enemy to kill a bunch of people with a nuke when cold, hungry people will do that for them.
Explode a small nuke 300-350 miles above the U.S. and most if not all electric based components will be useless/fried. EZ-PEEZY and cheap.
ReplyDeleteI gave that some thought.
Deletehttps://eatonrapidsjoe.blogspot.com/2018/03/muffin-i-am-glad-you-brought-that-up.html
Multiple EMP "shots" at about 50 miles of elevation would be required. The signature of the greatest pulse is smile-shaped and the only place where high-value targets are conveniently arranges is the Boston-DC portion of the Megalopolis. Other arrays of targets (West Coast, Texas-Louisiana coast) are configured wrong.
Further, most data is now moved on glass fiber which is essentially immune to EMP. Power is not, but data is.
Nukes are hard to come by.
How many conex containers are sitting next to our coasts, waiting to be unloaded? Any of those can contain missiles, or possibly nukes. Also, how many thousands of wartime aged foreign nationals both men and women have been allowed to infiltrate our country. Explosives and emp's may not be necessary if they all act together to cripple the power grid or information transfer.
ReplyDeleteInteresting how many of the ones caught are in identical camouflage uniforms and boots. No one seems to think it's remarkable. How many are housed on our military bases?
DeleteI'd expect a more focused attack on the network itself. Without communication the data on the servers is useless. All of the major interchange points are well known, and routing tables have been accidentally corrupted in the past.
ReplyDeleteWhat would the impact be if routing to the cloud providers got badly broken *and* the responsible engineers 'just couldn't figure out the problem' for days?
The railroad tunnel fire in Baltimore that took out a major fiber link a few years ago comes to mind..
It seems to me that the most devastating attack on American soil would be similar to the one we are currently experiencing. Cheap and self-propagating.
ReplyDeleteGood point.
DeleteERJ, we each have a credit card we use, mostly for the points and for which we pay off each month (mine is for Southwest, and having to travel home so much recently, it has actual made me money). That said, if the economy collapses, your contribution is duly noted.
ReplyDeleteAs to nuclear weapons - you are right, the are pretty 1960's. Any attacker would want to preserve as much resources and land as possible and create as much confusion as possible, which data center attacks would enable. Also, given our extreme dependency on everything being shipped into the cities, just disrupting the supply chains for a month or three would do the trick - again, enabled by a data center attack.
Why use high explosives when software will do the job just as effectively and even less traceably? I spent too many years in IT, including security work, to believe that the number and types of attacks we're undergoing now are anything other than probes and mapping. No company, non-profit or government agency is willing to spend what it takes for world-class security, no matter what the value of the data they're protecting. We're going to pay, dearly, for that short-sightedness.
ReplyDeleteI am undoubtedly going to display my ignorance here, but that has never stopped me before.
DeleteIt is my impression that authorizations are required to gain access to most computer systems. Yes, they can be hacked into but that requires skill-sets and time. Then, once in the system the hacker has to navigate and find places to insert malicious code or scoop (potentially encrypted) information.
Cyber-attacks do have the advantage of being a stand-off attack. An attacker could potentially be in Kabul or Tehran or Cancun and be invisible to the Department of Homeland Security.
The coordinated car-bomb attack scenario is more vulnerable because twenty teams of Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale running around are apt to get noticed.
The problem with Iranian, Chinese, etc missiles and conventional warheads is the accuracy. Saddam's attacks on Israel in 91 are an example of how poor their accuracy is, and sea launching them will reduce it further.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the others - a targeted attack against the network, either power or data, is more likely. There are several critical points in the US where a car bomb could take down data, electricity, and natural gas for most of the country, no missiles required.
A lot has happened since '91. It is rumored that Zolfaghar use GPS guidance and Iran has been using a variant of that basic family as an anti-ship missile.
DeleteAll claims are suspect but if a missile is a viable weapon against an armored, moving, 1000 foot long ship than it is a viable weapon against a commercial structure.
The classic response to lack of accuracy is to pull the trigger more times. Rather than sending one conventional weapon, launch ten.
the war between armenia and Azerbaijan is the future of warfare. swarms of drones decimated huge tank formations, then cleaned up any living thing on the ground in short order. the swarms even gained air superiority over first line aircraft. toss in emp/sat warfare. done and game over.
ReplyDeleteMy impression of UMA (drones) is that the data-link is their Achilles Heel.
DeleteAzerbaijan mopped up against the Armenians. The Armenians had no idea what was coming their way and had little recourse even if they had known.
One thing the US Military is top-notch at is signal collection and analysis. EM data is subject to corruption by jamming. Optical data is vulnerable to visibility limitations.
THe data demands of a UMA far exceed that of Facetime. Resolution, scan-time, multiple spectra (IR, Visible) and freedom from freezing and glitching are all demands of military video for navigation and targeting.
I am not saying that UMA are not a threat. I a saying that in the absence of artificial intelligence that can process the video in the UMA, the data-link makes both the platform and is an arrow pointing straight back at the "pilots" or the relay station.
Why attack the server farms when the electrical distribution centers are unprotected? Take down the transformers and the server farms will go down and stay down, as those transformers take months to fabricate and are made in... China!
ReplyDeleteMany server farms have backup generator that either run on diesel (stored on-site) or natural gas.
DeleteWhile the electrical distribution system is embarrassingly vulnerable to attack it presents difficulties to attack by a foreign power. For one thing, 24 hours after the first major attack every transformer will have a team stacking sandbags around them while the local SWAT team provides over-watch. Said another way, the scores of teams of terrorists embedded within the US have 24 hours to execute their attacks before it becomes much, much harder.
The missile attack has the advantage of being launched from off-shore which reduces the chances of being detected. It also has the advantage of being triggered from a central location and twenty minutes from the tops popping off the CONEX containers to the data-centers being smoldering ruins. Not much time to put together ad hoc defenses
I was recently in an internet conversation with people about this topic. One of them found this article. It's a relief to hear that at least SOME utilities are stockpiling transformer capacity.
Deletehttps://www.utilitydive.com/news/8-utilities-partner-to-stockpile-emergency-power-transformers/400702/
The Israelis seem to have this one sussed out already
ReplyDeletehttps://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43682/aftermath-of-israels-bombardment-of-syrian-port-seen-in-satellite-imagery