What factors determine cyber risk? What happens to a society that is too digitized? These questions arise spontaneously in whoever deals with cyber security, among them Chris Inglis, vice director of the NSA between the 2006 and the 2014, expressed his concerns in the article published on December 13 on The Atlantic, entitled: "Will Ukraine be hit by yet another holiday power-grid attack?".
The article, by Alyza Sebenius, analyzes the problems that have occurred in the last two years in Ukraine, directed against the national electricity grid system.
According to analysts of cyber security the attacks of past years would be the work of an organization that can count on the times and resources typical of a state, presumably Russia.
According to analysts, there is evidence to suggest that this year a similar but presumably more powerful and sophisticated attack will be repeated, not only against Ukraine but against the United States of America.
Inglis said he was worried because Ukraine and the United States are very different in terms of digitization (in favor of the United States) and this is not always an advantage.
In fact, Ukraine has been able to restore the system in a few hours thanks to the manual intervention of its technicians and the use of pre-existing technologies that increase the resilience of the system, if something similar happened in the United States, things could be different.
If it is true that an attack similar to the one in Ukraine in the 2016 could be easily tolerated by the system of the US mains, it is also true that this system is highly digitalized and interconnected and the restoration of its functionality could be more complex than we we could wait.
In general the question is that the greater the level of digitalization and interconnection of networks and systems, the greater the complexity and the risks connected to the system of systems to be analyzed, consequently the greater the impact of cyber security in such an environment.
And this applies to both the civil and military environment ...
To learn more:
- https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/12/ukraine-power-gri...
