Securing America's Connected Infrastructure Can't Wait - Justin Sherman coauthors
Justin Sherman, political science undergraduate student and fellow in New America's Cybersecurity Initiative recently coauthored with Deb Crawford for War on the Rocks arguing that, "adapting risk-based cybersecurity frameworks is crucial for addressing threats to infrastructure systems that are vulnerable to hacking."
Electrical grid blackouts, traffic light malfunctions, air traffic control failures, production plants gone haywire — for a while, such events were merely the stuff of Hollywood fantasy. But today, that is no longer the case. Industrial control systems, which command infrastructure and manufacturing processes in plants, traffic systems, and electrical grids, are increasingly “coming online” to interact with networks of small sensors and devices known as the “Internet of Things.” Together, these smaller devices and larger industrial systems form what specialists call the “Industrial Internet of Things,” and its vulnerability poses an enormous risk to national security. While cyber attacks on non-internet-connected critical infrastructure — like Stuxnet — required malicious code to be manually transferred to the victim device, hackers can now launch attacks on infrastructure remotely.