Like Cyber Polygon, RAND’s ‘Inverted Rook’ wargame warns of catastrophic cyber attacks leading to societal breakdown: perspective
The United States is unprepared for attacks on critical infrastructure, according to a wargame simulated by the RAND Corporation.
Prepared for the head of the US spy community — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) — the RAND report, “Defending the United States Against Critical Infrastructure Attacks: Exploring a Hypothetical Campaign of Cascading Impacts” details a wargame from earlier this year called “Inverted Rook,” which simulated multiple attacks on critical infrastructure.
The authors note that although this scenario is a hypothetical use case of a future adversarial campaign, it is based on real-world examples that have targeted “communications, financial services, health care, municipal services, energy, transportation, and water.”
In this fictional scenario, the motivation behind the simulated attacks was to interrupt US involvement in a conflict overseas by creating havoc, chaos, and mayhem on American soil through a combination of physical and cyber attacks on critical infrastructure.
These include:
Physical attacks on electrical substations
Ransomware attacks on government services
Malware attacks on power grids
Disruptions in transportation
Hackers remotely poisoning water treatment facilities
Cyber attacks on Wall Street
The ripple effect from each attack, either simultaneously, or one after another would lead to:
Government services being shut down
Power outages affecting hospitals, transportation, refrigeration, heating, etc.
Sickness and death from poisoned water, hypothermia, exposure, civil unrest, etc.
Financial services being disrupted
Splitting factions between those blaming domestic extremists, foreign adversaries, and their own government
The inability of government to go after foreign adversaries in order to deal with all the domestic chaos
According to RAND, “The adversary uses a variety of tactics to create an atmosphere of mistrust in government, sow tensions among the general populace, saturate the news media, and totally consume the target state’s political bandwidth to reach its ultimate goal of preventing, delaying, or constraining the US response to the adversary’s actions abroad.”
Additionally, “Attacks intended to forestall a US response to aggression overseas could create fear among the general public, undermine social cohesion, and paralyze political decision making structures.”
