The United States has long faced extraordinary levels of threats from cyberattacks targeting critical infrastructure. FBI Director Christopher Wray has so frequently and consistently sounded alarms about the dangers posed to electrical grids, water treatment facilities, and more that the warnings have become background noise.
Last week, for at least the second time, the warnings proved prescient, and Americans suffered because of a cyberattack against our critical infrastructure. One of the country’s largest prescription processors took its systems offline due to a cyberattack, forcing pharmacies to use manual procedures, causing long wait times or no service for a customer base that spans the globe, given that the impact included U.S. military clinics.
We have moved from theoretical attacks on our critical infrastructure to actual attacks with immediate and severe impacts on everyday life. Echoing the disruption seen during the Colonial Pipeline cyberattack in 2021, last week’s attack is a harbinger of things to come. China and our other digital adversaries are no longer just stealing valuable intellectual property; they are prepositioning their cyber bombs across our critical infrastructure to attack at a time and place of their choosing. But because these attacks happen in cyberspace, the battlefield is less tangible, and nation-state attacks blend in with service outages like AT&T’s, which turned out to be a software update gone awry and not a cyberattack.
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