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Cyberwarfare is a weapon of mass “disruption” and can bring down an entire country like the situation that occurred in Estonia, 2007 (Tamkin, 2017; McGuinness, 2007). A cyber-attack is more than just phishing and ID theft.
As streetlights, traffic lights, power grids, dams, sewer systems, transit lines and other services are added to the Internet for management control, they become targets for hostile states, terrorists, and hackers (Rundle, 2019). According to Rundle, “The more connected a city is, the more vulnerable it is to cyberattacks. Hackers have, in recent years, effectively held cites hostage through ransomware, sometimes crippling critical systems for months at a time” (Rundle, 2019). Being more dependent on technology results in more vulnerability. As more information on residents is collected, nation-states or terrorists could incorporate the information into cyberwarfare campaigns.
Cyberwarfare methods include: 1) denial of access to systems and data, 2) exploitation of information for advantage, 3) corrupting information, and 4) destroying information and information systems (Chapple & Seidl, 2015). Corrupting information can also include replacing data with bogus or error filled data. (Rundle, 2019). And cyberwarfare can target civilians and civilian systems (Chapple & Seidl, 2015) as well as military and government systems.
Such a massive attack is coming to the U.S.A. (Turak, 2018). Such an attack will disable government (Federal, state, county, city), banking (financial transactions, credit card), and communication (news media, Internet), with the power grid as an added target. In March 2019, in the western United States, there was a cyber-attack on the power grid (Sussman, 2019). The attack was successful because of a failure to patch a firewall. Is the United States prepared for a massive cyberattack?
There have been warnings. In 2018, Fazzini wrote, “Warnings about a massive cyberattack aren't new – intelligence officials have raised red flags for years” (Fazzini, 2018). The director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, warns of an impending “cyber 9/11” (Fazzini, 2018). Corporations and governments will not be the only ones impacted. The USA & UK have been warning of cyber-attacks to homes as well (Kirkpatrick & Nixon, 2018) due to smart technology and the Internet of Things. .
Research has indicated that cyberattacks can have a psychological impact (Gandhi et al., 2011, Modic and Anderson, 2015). The public is more likely to respond psychologically to the effects of a cyberattack rather than the cyberattack inconvenience (Gandhi et al., 2011, Minei and Matusitz, 2011). Psychological impact can be anxiety, worry, anger, outrage, and depression (Bada & Nurse, 2020).