United States faces an imminent threat of a “cyber Pearl Harbour” attack, which could cause massive physical destruction and loss of life, paralyse and shock the nation and create a profound new sense of vulnerability, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, has said.
Identifying the advancing cyber capabilities of Russia and China and a similar attempt by Iran to use cyberspace to its advantage; besides the large number of non-state actors, Panetta in a major policy speech on cyberspace announced that the United States is putting in place to stop cyber-attacks dead in their tracks.
“An aggressor nation or extremist group could gain control of critical switches and derail passenger trains, or trains loaded with lethal chemicals.
“They could contaminate the water supply in major cities, or shut down the power grid across large parts of the country,” Panetta said yesterday in his speech at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum on the Hudson River in New York.
“The most destructive scenarios involve cyber actors launching several attacks on our critical infrastructure at once, in combination with a physical attack on our country.
Attackers could also seek to disable or degrade critical military systems and communications networks,” he said.
“The collective result of these kinds of attacks could be “cyber Pearl Harbor“: an attack that would cause physical destruction and loss of life, paralyse and shock the nation, and create a profound new sense of vulnerability,” Panetta said as he referred to the some of the recent cyber-attacks on not only US facilities, but also that of other countries.
“These attacks mark a significant escalation of the cyber threat. And they have renewed concerns about still more destructive scenarios that could unfold. For example, we know that foreign cyber actors are probing America’s critical infrastructure networks,” he said.