Lights Out: A Cyberattack, a Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Ted Koppel reveals {that a} main cyberattack on America’s energy grid shouldn’t be solely doable however probably, that it will be devastating, and that the USA is shockingly unprepared.

“Fascinating, scary, and past well timed.”—Anderson Cooper

Think about a blackout lasting not days, however weeks or months. Tens of hundreds of thousands of individuals over a number of states are affected. For these with out entry to a generator, there isn’t any working water, no sewage, no refrigeration or mild. Meals and medical provides are dwindling. Units we depend on have gone darkish. Banks not perform, looting is widespread, and legislation and order are being examined as by no means earlier than.

It isn’t only a situation. A well-designed assault on simply one of many nation’s three electrical energy grids might cripple a lot of our infrastructure—and within the age of cyberwarfare, a laptop computer has grow to be the one needed weapon. A number of nations hostile to the USA might launch such an assault at any time. The truth is, as a former chief scientist of the NSA reveals, China and Russia have already penetrated the grid. And a cybersecurity advisor to President Obama believes that impartial actors—from “hacktivists” to terrorists—have the potential as properly. “It’s not a query of if,” says Centcom Commander Normal Lloyd Austin, “it’s a query of when.”

And but, as Koppel makes clear, the federal authorities, whereas properly ready for pure disasters, has no plan for the aftermath of an assault on the facility grid. The present Secretary of Homeland Safety suggests protecting a battery-powered radio.

Within the absence of a authorities plan, some people and communities have taken issues into their very own fingers. Among the many nation’s estimated three million “preppers,” we meet one whose doomsday retreat features a newly excavated three-acre lake, stocked with fish, and a Wyoming homesteader so self-sufficient that he crafted the hundreds of adobe bricks in his home by hand. We additionally see the unequalled catastrophe preparedness of the Mormon church, with its monumental storehouses, high-tech dairies, orchards, and proprietary trucking firm—the fruits of an extended custom of anticipating the worst. However how, Koppel asks, will atypical civilians survive?

With urgency and authority, one in every of our most famous journalists examines a risk distinctive to our time and evaluates potential methods to organize for a disaster that’s all however inevitable.