Cyber chaos: Commuters get a glimpse of the future

WASHINGTON - Commuters in Montgomery County Wednesday woke up to what seemed like an unfortunate but benign breakdown in the traffic control system.

"In Maryland, Montgomery County, the computer that controls the traffic signal apparently has crashed," said WTOP morning traffic reporter Lisa Baden.

She went on to report, "Your signals are not in rush hour (mode) and there is nothing Montgomery County can do to change that except ask for your patience."

At the same time, the 106-mile regional subway system, which transports 750,000 people in the Washington Metropolitan area fell victim to a recurrent computer glitch. Riders couldn't use their debit cards to pay for their trips. Many had to leave the stations and find other means to reach their destinations. For some, this was at least the third occurrence of this kind in the last month.

The two events were not connected or were no more than untimely breakdowns. Montgomery County officials say the traffic signals went down because of outdated equipment. WTOP's Adam Tuss says, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority computers failed because of power outages.

"Metro also has a tough task trying to prevent any sort of cyber attack against its system. As you see, one glitch and the computer system goes out of whack," says Tuss.

But were those faulty systems further damaged by outside forces?

On Aug. 14, 2003, at approximately 4:15 p.m. EDT, a massive widespread power outage occurred throughout parts of the Northeastern and Midwestern United States and Ontario, Canada. Roughly 45 million people in eight U.S. states and 10 million people in Ontario were left in the dark. It was the biggest blackout in history.

It was blamed on FirstEnergy Corp.'s failure to trim trees in part of its Ohio service area and an electronic flaw in General Electric Energy's Unix-based XA/21 energy management system.

But quietly, intelligence officials discussed the possibility that the Chinese People's Liberation Army gained access to a network that controlled electric power systems and brought down the grid.

A growing chorus of U.S. intelligence and cyber authorities are revisiting the possibility the Chinese may have been involved in 2003, and other cyber glitches in the U.S.

"Some day, somewhere, sometime, we're going to have a massive cyber attack which will disrupt activities in this country. You can almost bet on it," says Lee Hamilton, former vice chair of the 9-11 Commission.

"If you're able to take down part of the electricity grid, pretty much everything fails," says the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency James Woolsey.

"You don't have water being pumped. You don't have sewage being pumped. You don't have deliveries to grocery stores. It's pretty difficult to figure out what does work under those circumstances," Woolsey says.

To put it into context, Woolsey says, "Imagine a world that is not pre-1970, pre-Internet, but imagine a world that is pre-1870, pre-electricity."

First, the local and regional chaos would begin to set in, says John Bumgardner, research director of the independent, non-profit U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit.

"If you start having a day or two without power it's an inconvenience. You starting getting into a week, you start getting into a major inconvenience. Everything starts to collapse after about a week."

Then the bottom falls out, former Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell says.

"Think about the consequences of no electrical power in the U.S.A. I would argue in a short period of time it would have devastating consequences for the globe - loss of confidence in the U.S. dollar."

That's the reason why Pete Earnest, director of the International Spy Museum, and his staff have launched a series of speakers' events designed to educate the public about the vulnerability of the electrical system to hackers.

"This is one of the things we're all living with, and what we depict here is the nature of the threat and we take the possibility that it could bring down portions if not the entire electrical grid," says Earnest.

A critical piece of the effort at the Spy Museum is a video and graphic exhibit called "Weapons of Mass Disruption."

"I think people need to be aware that cyber attacks are harder to understand because you can't see them. It's one thing to have people fly a plane into the building and cause deaths. But these cyber attacks are taking place every single day and in many cases we don't know who is behind them," says Earnest.

(Copyright 2009 by WTOP. All Rights Reserved.)