Who’s winning the cyber war? The squirrels, of course

Jan 17

CyberSquirrel1 project shows fuzzy-tailed intruders cause more damage than “cyber” does.

WASHINGTON, DC—For years, the government and security experts have warned of the looming threat of “cyberwar” against critical infrastructure in the US and elsewhere. Predictions of cyber attacks wreaking havoc on power grids, financial systems, and other fundamental parts of nations’ fabric have been foretold repeatedly over the past two decades, and each round has become more dire. The US Department of Energy declared in its Quadrennial Energy Review, just released this month, that the electrical grid in the US “faces imminent danger from a cyber attack.”

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That was the message delivered at the Shmoocon security conference on Friday by Cris “SpaceRogue” Thomas, former member of the L0pht Heavy Industries hacking collective and now a security researcher at Tenable. In his presentation—entitled, “35 Years of Cyberwar: The Squirrels Are Winning”—SpaceRogue revealed the scale of the squirrelly threat to worldwide critical infrastructure by presenting data gathered by CyberSquirrel 1, a project that gathers information on animal-induced infrastructure outages collected from sources on the Internet.

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