MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS
I know that when the subject of cyber security and grid vulnerabilities are brought up on most talk shows undefined many people bring up the subject of an EMP attack. An electronic pulse from a nuclear weapon or an equivalent could shut down power systems indefinitely. There are also many people that when they hear about this weapon, they say to themselves that it will never be used or that perhaps the EMP scenario is part of a doomsday conspiracy theory.
While scary EMP scenarios have been created in Department of Defense tabletop exercises, there have been rumors that these weapons have been perfected and are in the arsenals of both China and Russia.
Russia is mastering systems that can already overcome the latest protections to keep the lights on, according to one of the nation’s leading experts.
The latest intelligence indicates that Russia has specialized a “super-electromagnetic pulse” weapon and warhead capable of traveling at Mach 20 that could put the U.S. in the dark with little notice.
Peter Vincent Pry, executive director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security, also said China has leapfrogged U.S. developments in electromagnetic pulse warfare.
What’s more, administration critics claim that President Biden’s decision to lift former President Trump’s ban on China involvement in the U.S. grid gives the communists a backdoor opening to attacking the nation’s electric supply.
During the Trump administration, Pry and others had success getting the White House and the Pentagon to focus on the issue and begin protecting key facilities. But the energy industry has been slow to act.
Proponents of preparing for an EMP attack believe that Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran see the U.S. as an easy target and one that could quickly be brought to its knees because so much of the economy relies on electricity, communications, and the internet, all of which would cease in an attack.
In his new report on Russia, Pry provided details in advancements in EMP warfare, or “cybergeddon,” Moscow has pushed, including a new weapon and high-speed delivery.
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Unlike conventional warfare, he said that EMP weapons are exploded high enough up in the atmosphere to wipe out the electric grids and computers in huge sections of the country. The outages could last over a year.
He said enemy nations with the weapons “could black out North America and NATO Europe and win World War III at the speed of light.”
His report came on the 26th anniversary of Russia’s nuclear war scares in which the Kremlin mistakenly believed a Norwegian meteorological rocket was an incoming U.S. EMP attack, the closest the superpowers ever came to nuclear war.
However, with the Biden administration comes yet another problem for the grid and that is Zero Day exploits undefined something that is often overlooked and creates an air of paranoia among analysts.
Zero Day exploits can already be in our grid system and if they are, they could trigger at anytime leaving systems vulnerable to a kill switch scenario.
Joe Biden is well aware of Zero Day because he along with Barack Obama had the NSA hoarding Zero Day exploits.
A Zero Day is a security flaw that has not yet been patched by the vendor and can be exploited and turned into a powerful weapon. Governments discover, purchase, and use zero days for military, intelligence and law enforcement purposes — a controversial practice, as it leaves society defenseless against other attackers who discover the same vulnerability.
In the summer of 2016 a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers released 300 megabytes of NSA cyberweapon code on the Internet. Near as we experts can tell, the NSA network itself wasn’t hacked; what probably happened was that a “staging server” for NSA cyberweapons — that is, a server the NSA was making use of to mask its surveillance activities — was hacked in 2013.
The NSA inadvertently re-secured itself in what was coincidentally the early weeks of the Snowden document release. The people behind the link used casual hacker lingo, and made a weird, implausible proposal involving holding a bitcoin auction for the rest of the data: undefinedAttention government sponsors of cyber warfare and those who profit from it !!!! How much you pay for enemies cyber weapons?”
Still, most people believe the hack was the work of the Russian government and the data release some sort of political message. Perhaps it was a warning that if the US government exposes the Russians as being behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee — or other high-profile data breaches — the Russians will expose NSA exploits in turn.
Over the past few years, different parts of the US government have repeatedly assured us that the NSA does not hoard “zero days” the term used by security experts for vulnerabilities unknown to software vendors. After we learned from the Snowden documents that the NSA purchases zero-day vulnerabilities from cyberweapons arms manufacturers, the Obama administration announced, in early 2014, that the NSA must disclose flaws in common software so they can be patched (unless there is “a clear national security or law enforcement” use).
Later that year, National Security Council cybersecurity coordinator and special adviser to the president on cybersecurity issues Michael Daniel insisted that US doesn’t stockpile zero-days. An official statement from the White House in 2014 said the same thing.
The Shadow Brokers data shows this is not true. The NSA hoards vulnerabilities.
In the nineties, cybersecurity firms sold antivirus software; penetration-testing companies sold the service of breaking through your firewall, to show you how they got in.
They all peddled an amalgam of fear, uncertainty, and doubt that, in the tech world, had come to be abbreviated as fud. Some of those private companies realized that it wasn’t efficient to maintain a big staff of analysts when they could just pay bounties to hackers all over the world to figure out how to break into a system. Governments and intelligence agencies, too, started offering bounties for bugs, paying hackers, brokers, and, above The NSA, in conjunction with telecommunications companies, has built a system that can reach deep into the U.S. Internet backbone and cover 75% of traffic in the country, including not only metadata but the content of online communications. The report also explains how the NSA relies on probabilities, algorithms and filtering techniques to sift through the data and find information related to foreign intelligence investigations.
When the worm escaped, Joe Biden, then the Vice-President, suspected Israel of hastening the program, and breaking it. “Sonofabitch,” he allegedly said. “It’s got to be the Israelis.” It infected a hundred countries and tens of thousands of machines before it was stopped.
Now with this in mind, we have to once again bring up the chilling reminder that with this much power in the hands of the few, comes the dark reality of heavy-handed regulation of the Internet and in some cases, switching it off in order to silence or curtail communication.
Nancy Pelosi and her ilk were so terrified of a megalomaniacal tyrant having the codes to the nukes undefined now we have a President who knows a few things about doomsday cyber exploits.
The idea of an internet kill switch has always been a feared and tangible government option when there are debates over cyber security measures and the possibility of an internet attack. Although legalese allowing the President to flip a figurative kill switch to shut down parts of the Internet have been removed from the cyber security debate, this does exclude the possibility that the government can’t get the word from the president to shut down or take over communications systems including the internet.
Many internet experts have assured us that it would be virtually impossible for the governments of the United States and Europe to completely shut down the entire net. This doesn’t mean that governments aren’t seeking ways to find communication system overrides in case of national emergencies.
The internet was the brain child of CERN and DARPA and throughout history, we have heard of scandals of back door cyber frauds from INSLAW to STUXNET.
Today, any sufficiently motivated government or criminal enterprise can get its hands on hacking tools, including zero-day exploits, regardless of regulation.
One of my last shows of 2020 dealt with what the World Economic Forum calls the cyber-pandemic. The World Economic Forum’s next agenda includes what is called a cyber-pandemic that is supposed to flush away old legacy systems to make way for new ones. The only way this can be done is to destroy our trust in the old internet in order to make way for a highly controlled one.
If you Google the World Economic Forum’s cyber pandemic, you will see that the next phase in the path to the great reset is to create a need for more cyber security which includes both a medical surveillance state, cashless society, and a militarized surveillance apparatus for the entire planet.
According to what is called “agenda setting” the World Economic Forum’s website says: COVID-19 has highlighted the interconnectedness and interdependencies of our digital infrastructure as well as key breaking points for cooperation. A global cyberattack would be very disruptive in the current environment. Are we ready for it? How can the lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic be used to prepare for future shocks?
If lockdowns were successful in ruining economies, how does cybercrime ruins the lives of those who have now been forced into the new normal of telecommuting and interconnectedness online?
There is a sophisticated system of control and there are many intelligence hubs that can be targets in this cyberwar. While these systems can be rebuilt, the information they contain can all disappear and be replaced with revised information.
There are worldwide data hubs that host global internet communications. There are hundreds, if not thousands of these facilities worldwide. They work with each other to distribute the world’s internet traffic. If there is a disruption anywhere along this complex network, we would see modern life as we know it change dramatically.
While the system is designed to absorb the impact of failure at a few of these hubs, a chain reaction could cause a domino effect where the systems we count on for life giving resources would be limited if not dismantled permanently.
Julian Assange, warned us of cyber vulnerabilities that have been stored by the intelligence agencies – to use as shut down tools. They can be compared to internet weapons of mass destruction set aside for an internet kill switch whenever they feel draconian measures are necessary.
The arrogant recklessness of the people who have been buying and selling the vulnerability of the rest of us is not just part of an intelligence-agency game; it has been the ethos of Wall Street and Silicon Valley for decades.
While critics will say that Donald Trump was soft on cybersecurity threats, Biden wants to fortify them. He is well aware of how vulnerbale we are because we hoard Zero Day exploits and are not at all afraid to use them against other countries. They have them too and thus we see that Biden laid out a series of cybersecurity initiatives at his inauguration, including earmarking $10 billion for various cybersecurity defense initiatives. Those included hiring key security personnel to support for the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
The significance of this strategy is considered paramount, with the U.S. government reeling on the heels of the SolarWinds cyberattack.
It is believed that there has been an ongoing cyber war since March and since then those who have been involved have become bolder in their actions.
The Nashville Bombing has since disappeared from the radar but now that the debris has settled there are many tech writers who are claiming that Anthony Warner fired yet another shot in the cyberwar demonstrating the vulnerabilities of the system and somehow exploited or in a paranoid way tried to handicap vulnerable systems with a chain reaction that failed.
Experts say it was domestic terrorism targeting the cyber infrastructure.
Circumstantial evidence suggests that Warner was protesting 5G technology — reportedly. an FBI line of inquiry. The camper van was parked in front of an AT&T transmission building and the explosion knocked down a network hub. The company website called the blast “devastating,” reporting secondary fires, loss of power, damaged equipment, and hazardous work in a disaster zone. Internet and cellphone service across parts of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alabama was badly affected. AT&T scrambled to reroute service or deploy portable cell sites, with 65 percent of service restored two days later.
In the polarized American domestic context, U.S. experts have focused on right-wing radicals like white supremacists anti-federal government groups, the Boogaloo movement, and “anti-Antifa” as well as left-wing groups such as anarchists and anti-fascist organizations Antifa. But anti-technology violence also has deep roots and may have broader impact, since it often targets critical infrastructure and could affect millions.
It is one big “bad actor” digital Bogey man scenario that is already happening – it is hidden and silent –the Zero Day exploits are waiting to be unleashed like cyber nukes to destroy our country’s infrastructure – We have used them against other countries since the Bush administration and well into the Obama administration.
President Biden I am sure is waiting for the word to retaliate for the SolarWinds hack and maybe the retaliation is well underway—only time will tell .
It is countdown to Zero Day.
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