Cybersecurity

Who Is Hacking the U.S.?

As the Internet of Things evolves into the Internet of Everything, if you take out one part of it, you can take out cascading parts. We have no single authority in the U.S. government that’s responsible for the electric grid and fixing it and building resilience into it, short of the president. And we have then a condition that makes it possible, really plausible, for hacking. Or an electromagnetic pulse.

The commission on the electromagnetic pulse that looked at this seven years ago, chaired by Ronald Reagan’s science adviser, Dr. Bill Graham, had two estimates for the loss of life if you lose the electric grid in the U.S. over I think it was a five-year period. One was that you lost two-thirds of the population to disease and social disruption and so forth. The more troubling estimate was you lost 90% of the American population.