(by Alessandro Rugolo) What factors determine cyber risk? What happens to a society that is too digitized? These questions arise spontaneously in those involved in cyber security, including Chris Inglis, deputy director of the NSA between 2006 and 2014, expressed his concerns in the article published on December 13 in 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 cyber security analysts, the attacks of past years are the work of an organization that can count on the time and resources typical of a state, presumably Russia.
Also according to the analysts, there is evidence that leads us to think that a similar but presumably more powerful and sophisticated attack will be repeated this year, and not only against Ukraine but against the United States of America.
Inglis was concerned that 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 was 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 issue is that the greater the level of digitization and interconnection of networks and systems, the greater the complexity and risks associated with 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 environments ...
Source Online Defense