You Won't Believe How Vulnerable America Is to Cyber Attacks!

Cyber Attacks on America have only grown over the last 20 years. Whether its grandma getting scammed on the phone or global espionage, the truth is that its only getting more dangerous to rely on unprotected systems for our critical infrastructure. It is crucial to understand the implications of these attacks.

While most view the most dangerous cyber-attack they could receive would be social security numbers and bank details being uncovered, the failure to comprehend the scale and devastation that these attacks can lead to our ruin. Both as citizens and as a nation.

Firstly, a cyber-attack is an attempt/success made by hackers in an attempt to damage, destroy or even spy on a computer network or system. The types of cyber-attacks range in both how they attack and what their goal is. Malware attacks and phishing are some of the more common but the types of attack capable have near endless possibilities. The goal of these attacks can be simple like getting login credentials for emails or services. For example, the 2011 PlayStation Network Outage (PSN Hack), after an “external intrusion” Sony was forced to deactivate the PlayStation servers lasting 23 days. Along with that, 77 MILLION accounts were compromised, and Sony confirmed that “personally identifiable information” had been exposed from each of those 77 million accounts. That's 77 million people that just wanted to play GTA have their personal info leaked due to that attack.

I could spend all day listing the different attacks that have happened just this year alone. But for the sake of my time and yours we will just go over some of the big ones. Cyber-attacks on our military infrastructure are particularly eye opening due to the assumption that out of all Americans surely the US Military has the best out there. Or at least that's what I thought.

In 2008 I was wrong, when a malware from a USB drive was plugged into a laptop that was attached to the US Central Command spread through the network. According to a Wired article, “That code spread undetected on both classified and unclassified systems…from which data could be transferred to servers under foreign control.” This malware had the ability to scan computers for data, open and then send through backdoors, classified data from US Central Command. The true scale of the breach remains a close secret and is unlikely to see the light of day. The attack was found to be from one or more “Russian civilian and military intelligence Services (RIS)” according to a report by the FBI and DHS.

This attack on the brighter side did lead to the creation of the United States Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) which according to the US Department of Defense, “USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries”.

So, it seems like the military has gotten its act together to face this rising threat.

It’s quite apparent that not everybody realizes the impact of cyber warfare in their daily lives. Let's talk now about you, and what a cyber-attack on you can look like.

Attacks on Michigan power grids in May and June left 5570+ Americans without power according to the DoE. Now for most people when the power goes out you grab a flashlight and some candles and read a book or something, but for some when the power goes out it means grandma sitting freezing in her house with the phone line not working, it means the guy who is sleeping with his oxygen mask suddenly wakes to no oxygen. For some no power can mean life or death, think of all the people using lifesaving machines from heat in wintertime to breathing literal life into your lungs with oxygen machines.

Even the less lethal consequences can have dastardly effects. No electricity so that you can work and get paid, to not have charge in your phone to contact family and friends. To move away from frozen grandmas and to our most prized thing of all, our children. In January 2023 alone, I was able to find 9 different attacks on school districts. Washington, Massachusetts twice, Arizona, Oregon, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Iowa. States from all over the country are facing cyber-attacks more and more.

Between 2016-2022 over 1,600 cyber incidents have occurred involving schools and districts. These attacks range from attacks on school’s computer systems being locked out and a ransom demanded to complete breaches in personal information. In Arizona on January 20th the Tuscan Unified School District got hacked resulting in the breach of names and personal identifiers in combination with social security numbers, of an outstanding 28,948 persons. This is still small compared to a similar hack on the Edmonds School district in Washington where the same information of 91,325 persons was reported. All this just through schools.

Our other infrastructure in this country faces growing threats as well.

In November of this year, over a dozen attacks on hospitals and healthcare facilities resulted in a similar manner to school attacks. Lighter attacks from shutting down of systems and equipment to total breaches of personal and medical information.

Nowhere with computers are safe unless an effort was made to protect recently. Even then the best hackers can breach almost any door.

Education, Health Care, Power Grid, Airports, Financial Providers, Local Governments, Credit Unions, IT Providers, Water Authority, Food Suppliers, Vehicle Manufacturers, Trains, Universities, Law Firms, Building Material Suppliers for God’s sake. The list could keep going for days and that's just this year by the way.

The obvious and outstanding truth here is that our cyber security is constantly being challenged and tested. None of our public institutions are safe and the consequences can be deadly.

We’ve covered just a few, but I implore you to take a few minutes and think about what could happen.

Attacks on power grids large enough to leave vast parts of this country without power, attacks on fuel providers or shipping ports, delaying or even suspending access to certain goods like fuel, food and medicine.

Think about what could happen if someone hacked our nuclear silos and sent those off or breached our country's spy network. The possibilities are nearly endless and frankly quite terrifying. This does give us the opportunity to protect ourselves and our nation.

Now, more than ever it's important to put pressure on politicians and policy makers, companies that we give our information to, to tighten up security, and put in place laws that make our country safer from cyber threats.

It's quite clear we are extremely vulnerable; I thank the lord that these attacks haven’t been more devastating to us Americans. We need to let policy makers know that we want infrastructure security in all of these systems that lack it. We all need to protect our infrastructure.

The truth is these systems benefit us all. Schools give us education, power grids give us electricity, hospitals fix us when we break. The cyber security of all these systems must be improved in our growing age on computer dependent systems.