Category Archives: Industry Jobs Oil Economics

Mexican Drug Cartels Embedded with Terrorists

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Motorist With ISIS Flag Makes Bomb Threat Against Police

Emad Karakrah (Chicago Police Department)

A man who had an ISIS flag waving from his vehicle is facing several charges after he threatened police with a bomb Wednesday morning when he was pulled over on the Southwest Side.

Emad Karakrah, 49, was charged with felony counts of disorderly conduct and aggravated fleeing; and a misdemeanor count of driving on a never-issued license, according to Chicago police. He was also issued three traffic citations.

Someone called police after seeing a “suspicious person” driving a silver Pontiac southbound in the 7700 block of South Kedzie at 9:18 a.m. with an ISIS flag waving out the window, according to a police report.

Officers attempted to pull over the vehicle, but the driver took off, according to the report. The officers called for assistance, and another officer pulled the vehicle over after it went through several red lights.

The man told police during his arrest that there was a bomb in the car and he would detonate it if they searched the vehicle, according to the report.

A bomb squad, the FBI and Homeland Security responded to the scene and searched the vehicle, but no bomb was found, authorities said.

Judge Laura Sullivan ordered Karakrah held on a $55,000 bond Thursday. He is next scheduled to appear in court on Sept. 3.

Investigation: Collusion Between Terrorists and Mexican Cartels is a Threat to U.S.

Lead investigator says Obama administration has a responsibility to stop it

Muslim terrorists are using Mexican drug cartels to infiltrate the U.S. southern border to plan attacks on the United States from within, according to Sun City Cell, a documentary produced in collaboration between Judicial Watch and TheBlaze TV.

“Mexican drug cartels are smuggling foreigners from countries with terrorist links into a small Texas rural town near El Paso and they’re using remote farm roads—rather than interstates—to elude the Border Patrol and other law enforcement barriers,” states Judicial Watch. “Our nation’s unsecured border with Mexico is an existential threat to our nation.”

Chris Farrell, the director of research and investigations at Judicial Watch, says the cartel’s ability to completely control the El Paso region paved the way for a sophisticated narcoterrorism partnership.

“If you want to move something from point A to point B, a contraband item, you need their assistance, there’s a price tag with it, its all about making money,” he says. “There’s a tremendous amount of public corruption. There are cartels and those criminal enterprises do billions and billions of dollars worth of elicit business. Their corruption runs deep and it runs high and so there are people that are afraid frankly for this story to come out.”

Jonathan Gilliam, retired Navy Seal and former FBI special agent, says it’s always been his fear that high-level terrorist leaders would try to get into the United States and plan things here.

“For them to send out orders from overseas is one thing, but to see them come into the United States and actually start helping plan and give orders, that just shows another level of commitment and it shows a drastic shift in their mindset and where there dedication is,” says Gilliam. “I mean you don’t just go embed yourself into where you want to start a war, unless you’re serious about starting a war.”

“It probably means that’s not the first time they’ve gotten people in this way. And it’s really scary when you think about it,” said Gilliam.

Despite the alleged collusion between the Mexican cartels and Muslim terrorists, many tout El Paso, Texas, as a safe city to live.

“The cartel wants El Paso to be the shiny penny where everything is good, don’t look behind the curtain over here,” says an anonymous source in the documentary. “Everything is wonderful. And so, it’s known by the gang members and the criminals in all the area, if you draw attention, you hurt a police officer, you do anything that interferes with their business, they’ll melt you in a bucket of acid and not think twice about it.”

“The law enforcement for the most part is bought and paid for,” the source continues. “Not a lot of people have respect for police. The criminals certainly don’t, but what they have fear of is an organization that doesn’t have Fourth Amendment and doesn’t use jail cells, and that’s the cartel.”

Farrell says the Obama administration has a responsibility in putting an end to the alleged narcoterrorism ring.

“The principal functions of the administration, certainly of a president, is to provide for the security of the country and this is an issue that goes to terrorism, it goes to narcotics trafficking, human smuggling all sorts of areas of security and criminality, preventing crime,” he said. “And so of course it’s the administration’s responsibility.”

A former military intelligence officer specializing in counterintelligence and human intelligence, Farrell spent four years on the investigation and has traveled to El Paso many times to meet with dozens of sources for this story.

He says the investigation will continue.

“This is probably one-third of the whole story about what’s going on in El Paso right now,” he said. “Two-thirds of the story we have not even reported on. There is so much more and our investigation continues.”

“It only gets worse, frankly,” he said. “If people were disturbed or concerned about what they saw in this portion of the story, it is a fragment of the overall story.”

Have You Met Tom Steyer?

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Tom Steyer is a billionaire having created wealth due to hedge funds with concentration on the green agenda and going against coal, fossil fuels and promoting climate change.

He has been a champion of the Obama White House and is called on often for support in California and Washington DC power circles. He is even considering running for a U.S. Senate seat to take up where Senator Barbara Boxer leaves behind as she is retiring. (yeah!)

So, read on to know more about Steyer….some truths bubble to the surface where some major failures have become real.

Lawmakers call for oversight hearings on green jobs measure

AP:   SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California lawmakers from both parties are calling for more stringent oversight of a clean jobs initiative after an Associated Press report found that a fraction of the promised jobs have been created.

The report also found that the state has no comprehensive list to show much work has been done or energy saved, three years after voters approved a ballot measure to raise taxes on corporations and generate clean-energy jobs.

“It’s clear to me that the Legislature should immediately hold oversight hearings to get to the bottom of why yet another promise to the voters has been broken,” Senate Minority Leader Bob Huff, R-San Dimas, said in a news released Monday.

The AP reported that three years after voters passed Proposition 39, money is trickling in at a slower-than-anticipated rate, and more than half of the $297 million given to schools so far has gone to consultants and energy auditors. The board created to oversee the project and submit annual progress reports to the Legislature has never met.

Voters in 2012 approved the Clean Energy Jobs Act by a large margin, closing a tax loophole for multistate corporations. The Legislature decided to send half the money to fund clean energy projects in schools, promising to generate more than 11,000 jobs each year.

Instead, only 1,700 jobs have been created in three years, raising concerns about whether the money is accomplishing what voters were promised.

Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, the Los Angeles Democrat who was the primary booster of Proposition 39 and its implementation in the state Legislature, said Monday that the measure is already successful, and said it is too soon to assess its effectiveness.

“Most school districts are either in the planning phase or are preparing to launch large-scale, intensive retrofit projects that will maximize benefits to students, school sites and the California economy,” de Leon said in a joint statement with the initiative’s chief supporter, billionaire investor and philanthropist Tom Steyer, who funded the initiative campaign with $30 million of his own money.

“We have every confidence that, as more projects break ground and come on line, Californians in every region of the state will increasingly realize the full benefits of improvements that make schools stronger and more energy-efficient,” they said.

But other Democrats said the report raised concerns.

“We should hold some oversight hearings to see how the money is being spent, where it is being spent and seeing if Prop. 39 is fulfilling the promise that it said it would,” said Assemblyman Henry Perea, D-Fresno.

Republican lawmakers sought to present Proposition 39 as a cautionary tale for other proposals as Democrats push bills to further limit greenhouse gas emissions.

“Where’s the oversight? We are talking about giving away a whole lot of power to unelected bureaucracies,” said Republican Assemblyman James Gallagher of Nicolaus.

The State Energy Commission, which oversees Proposition 39 spending, could not provide any data about completed projects or calculate energy savings because schools are not required to report the results for up to 15 months after completion, spokeswoman Amber Beck said.

Still, Beck said she believes the program is on track. The commission estimates that based on proposals approved so far, Proposition 39 should generate an estimated $25 million a year in energy savings for schools.

Not enough data has been collected for the nine-member oversight board of professors, engineers and climate experts to meet, she said.

Among the planned projects are $12.6 million in work in the Los Angeles Unified School District, that would save $1.4 million a year in energy costs. Two schools were scheduled this summer to receive lighting retrofits and heating and cooling upgrades, but no construction work has been done on either site, LAUSD spokeswoman Barbara Jones said.

School district officials around the state say they intend to meet a 2018 deadline to request funds and a 2020 deadline to complete projects. They say the money will go to major, long-needed projects and are unconcerned schools have applied for only half of the $973 million available so far, or that $153 million of the $297 million given to schools has gone for energy planning by consultants and auditors.

“If there’s money out there, we’re going for it,” said Tom Wright, an energy manager for the San Diego Unified School District, which has received $9.5 million of its available $9.7 million.

Leftover money would return to the general fund for unrestricted projects of lawmakers’ choosing.

The proposition is also bringing in millions less each year than initially projected. Proponents told voters in 2012 that it would send up to $550 million annually to the Clean Jobs Energy Fund. But it brought in just $381 million in 2013, $279 million in 2014 and $313 million in 2015.

There’s no exact way to track how corporations reacted to the tax code change, but it’s likely most companies adapted to minimize their tax burdens, nonpartisan legislative analyst Ken Kapphahn said. He also said the change applies to a very small number of corporations.

Neither the Energy Commission nor Tim Rainey, director of the California Workforce Investment Board, could identify the types of jobs created by Proposition 39 projects. They said that information would be available when the oversight board meets for the first time, likely in October or November.

Schools often prioritize lighting projects because they work well with the Energy Commission’s formula, which requires schools to save at least $1.05 on energy costs for every dollar spent.

Douglas Johnson, a state government expert at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California, said the slow results show the oversight board should have gotten involved much earlier.

“They should have been overseeing all stages of this project, not just waiting until the money’s gone and seeing where it went,” Johnson said.

Obama’s New War on Oil/Gas, EPA his Weapon

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First there was coal….now…it is oil and gas….his weapon? The EPA

Obama has given battle plans to General McCarthy, Secretary of the EPA

The Obama administration’s war on coal continues.

Speaking recently before a D.C. green group, Resources for the Future, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency head Gina McCarthy emphasized her belief that Congressional Republicans would find it difficult to roll back the newly-finalized rules for the Clean Power Plan which will, in effect, largely put an end to the use of coal as a fuel source for electricity generation in the name of doing something meaningful about global warming.

McCarthy projected victory despite the almost certain reality of extensive and lengthy litigation over the rules. To her “the extensive comment record and completed litigation over EPA’s underlying authority to regulate carbon under the Clean Air Act are sticking points for a future Administration intent on reversing the rules,” said an analysis of her remarks by Capital Alpha Partners, a Washington firm producing public policy research for institutional investors.

“The Administration is resolute with respect to climate change, and we think McCarthy’s remarks speak to the survival of the rules as a legacy priority for the President, on par with healthcare reform and Iran diplomacy,” the firm said in a recent update.

Legacy or no legacy, the Clean Power Plan will prove very expensive to implement. It will intrude on the governing authority of the different states, will push electricity rates through the roof (as Obama promised he would do in his 2008 campaign for president), kill countless jobs in coal and related industries, and make a severe dent in U.S. electricity generating capacity. Even without full implementation, because the handwriting is already on the wall Wyoming and West Virginia look like they are slipping into a recession with most of the other big coal states likely to follow within a few quarters.

What we get for that is a scintilla of reduction in the generation of so-called greenhouse gases that is almost certainly not worth the enormous expense and the promise of more, not just where coal is concerned, but across the entire energy sector.

Barack Obama’s quiet war on oil

Politico: The oil and gas industry is in the crosshairs of the administration’s eco-agenda, even if Shell gets its Arctic drilling permit.

President Barack Obama’s enemies have long accused him of waging a “war on coal.” But a very different war on oil and gas is coming next.

The newest phase of Obama’s environmental agenda has the oil and natural gas industry in its crosshairs, with plans to curb greenhouse gas pollution from rigs and refineries, tighten oversight of drilling on public lands and impose a strict ozone limit that industry lobbyists slam as “the most expensive regulation ever.”

The administration still might hand some modest victories to the industry along the way — as early as Friday, for example, the Interior Department may give Shell Oil a final green light for expanded drilling off Alaska’s Arctic coast. And unlike the massive climate rule that the EPA issued for power plants last week, the administration’s actions on oil and gas will be quieter, more piecemeal and harder to track.

Still, the oil industry’s top lobbying group says it’s facing a “regulatory avalanche or a tidal wave” — one that some of Obama’s critics have been bracing for.

The administration has “ridden this horse as far as it wants to ride it,” GOP energy lobbyist and strategist Mike McKenna said in an interview, tying the oil and gas crackdown to Obama’s efforts to make wind and solar power more competitive. He said Obama and his team “have always been very clear-eyed about their strategy: they want to make affordable, dependable, traditional fuels like oil, gas and coal more expensive. … This is just the natural rush at the finish line.”

But greens say it’s past time for Obama to start reining in oil and gas as the next step in the climate legacy that he’s made such a priority for his second term. For these activists, the EPA’s power plant rules represented only a down payment.

“We’ve seen the administration willing to take on King Coal,” Jamie Henn, co-founder of the climate activist group 350.org, said in a recent interview. “They’ve got to go after bigger bad guys, like Big Oil and the Koch brothers.”

Environmentalists say the upcoming actions still won’t hit drillers and refiners as hard as EPA is hitting coal-burning power plants.

For example, the administration promised this year to slash oil- and gas-related emissions of methane — an especially potent greenhouse gas — by as much as 40 percent from 2005 levels by 2025. But that level of reduction is “not hard, nor is it particular costly” to achieve, Environmental Defense Fund Vice President Mark Brownstein said.

Unlike the tectonic realignment away from coal underway in the power sector, thanks in part to the EPA’s rules, “nothing would be required of the oil and gas industry that would cause it to have to fundamentally rethink how it does business,” he added.

Republicans in Congress may yet succeed in stopping or slowing down some of the multiple regulations that oil and gas hate the most during final negotiations on funding the government beyond next month. But GOP leaders have little to no appetite for risking a government shutdown to bury the regulations. And the refinery and ozone regulations are both tied to court-ordered deadlines this fall, making it harder for lawmakers to stop the train.

The limits on toxic air emissions from refineries that EPA proposed last year could cost more than $20 billion to implement, according to industry estimates, though the American Petroleum Institute said on Thursday that it hopes to see the final version significantly scaled back. EPA’s projected price tag was much smaller, at $239 million in total costs for the new emissions standards. Much more here.

 

 

 

 

 

Obama’s Summer Reading List

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CBS reported: You can’t golf all day.

President Obama packed plenty to read for his two weeks vacationing with his family in Martha’s Vineyard.

Here are Obama’s six summer reads, a mix of critically acclaimed fiction and nonfiction, obtained first by ABC News:

  • All That Is, by James Salter
  • All The Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr
  • The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert
  • The Lowland, by Jhumpa Lahiri
  • Between The World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • Washington: A Life, by Ron Chernow

Let’s examine one of them:

Between the World and Me and reviewed by the Christian Science Monitor has some interesting facts and demonstrates volumes of envy, blame and plight.

In his 1978 biography of James Baldwin, Louis H. Pratt called the eminent 20th-century African-American writer a man “concerned with the destruction of the fantasies and delusions of a contented audience … determined to avoid reality.” Baldwin was born poor in New York City and personally knew racial intolerance. With regard to race, Pratt’s Baldwin was a “disturber of the peace” – one who revealed uncomfortable truths to a society mired in complacency. Thirty-five years later, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison now invokes Baldwin’s legacy in praising Ta-Nehisi Coates’s powerful new memoir Between the World and Me: “I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates.”

Coates, a national correspondent at The Atlantic, has, in “Between the World and Me,” crafted a highly provocative, thoughtfully presented, and beautifully written narrative concerning his own misgivings about the ongoing racial struggle in America. In this slender (176 pages) volume Coates is also, like Baldwin before him, set on revealing similar “uncomfortable truths” to 21st-century America. Coates’s prose is addressed to his 15-year-old son Samori. In the wake of all the recent tragedies involving black men and boys at the hands of police – Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri in particular – Coates says he cannot help but fear for Samori’s life.

Writing ruefully and with a hint of resignation, Coates writes to Samori about the way that “those who believe they are white” have been essentially “pilfering” the bodies of African Americans throughout the course of American history. In the wake of these many recent and lethal confrontations between law enforcement and black Americans, Coates expresses little hope that there will be meaningful change any time soon. The Rev. Clementa Pinckney, slain with eight parishioners in a church in Charleston, S. C.; the alleged “suicide” of Sandra Bland in Waller County, Texas; and the death of Samuel DuBose at the hands of a University of Cincinnati police officer, are all just more grist for what Coates sees as a mill of misery, mistrust, and hopelessness.

Coates refers to the greater white American population as “Dreamers” – living in a “Dream” festooned with sentimental mythology such as “perfect houses with nice lawns,” “ice cream socials,” “the Cub Scouts,” “block associations,” and “Memorial Day cookouts.” In Coates’s mind, this mythology has clouded any real appreciation or empathy for those for whom the “Dream” is unattainable. As Coates writes to his son, “even your relatively privileged security can never match a sustained assault launched in the name of the Dream.” In Coates’s telling, there are just too many who have become victims of it: Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Jordan Davis, and Kajieme Powell, are just a few.

In one powerful passage, and in a direct appeal to those who would look away from the numerous black fatalities in recent years, Coates asserts: “America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist.… One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard.”

Having grown up in West Baltimore, the son of William Paul Coates, a former Black Panther and Vietnam War veteran, Ta-Nehisi Coates (his hyphenated first name is the Egyptian translation for ancient Nubia, from which his family originated), was prodigious at reading and writing in his youth and subsequently attended Howard University – “The Mecca” – in Washington, D.C. As a teenager, Coates eagerly consumed the writings of historian and Howard professor Chancellor Williams, whose book, “Destruction of Black Civilization” became a revelation to him. This introduced Coates to the excesses of European colonialism and its disastrous effects in plundering the cultures and economies as well as the bodies of Africans and their countries.

Once at Howard, Coates was drawn to the vast African-American holdings of the Moorland Spingarn Research Center, where Coates’s father once worked. He would “draw out my pen, and one of my black-and-white composition books. I would open the books and read, while filling my composition books with notes on my reading, new vocabulary words, and sentences of my own invention.”

But while Coates was discovering himself, he also became disillusioned by the realization that those black thinkers and writers whose works he devoured at the library often were antagonistic to, and worked against, one another. The one intellectual Coates found close identity with at that time was Malcolm X.

“He was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I’d ever heard,” Coates writes. “He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief. If he was angry, he said so. If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, as natural as Prometheus for hating the birds.”

Coates then does a slow burn over another touchy subject – a quote attributed to the Nobel prize-winning writer Saul Bellow: “When the Zulus produce a Tolstoy, we will read him.” Coates found satisfaction in a quote by author Paul Wiley, who replied in kind, “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus.… Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” As a result, Coates, who admitted error in having originally accepted Bellow’s remark as valid, at last repudiated it as “racecraft,” where, in effect, racism becomes race.

“The Struggle,” as Coates wrote to Samori, named for Samori Toure, who fought against French colonizers in Guinea during the 19th century, often “escapes our grasp.” He quotes Harvard law professor Derrick Bell, who called blacks “faces at the bottom of the well.” But Coates optimistically adds “But there really is wisdom down here, and that wisdom accounts for much of the good in my life. And my life down here accounts for you.”

Coates emphasizes that although blacks in America have endured the hardships of slavery – having been relentlessly “carried off and divided up into policies and stocks” – he has taught his son to “respect every human being as singular,” though that respect must also extend into the past. He writes eloquently about how “You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold.”

One moving event Coates relates involves the day he took his young son to see the film “Howl’s Moving Castle” in Manhattan. While exiting the theater, Coates’s dawdling son was angrily pushed on an escalator by a white woman. Coates became enraged and responded accordingly. He expresses personal shame for his loss of temper, noticing to his horror that Samori was intensely frightened by his reaction. Coates was enraged that someone had “invoked their right over the body of my son,” but also expressed regret that in seeking to defend his son, he had actually “endangered” him.

Perhaps the most emotionally wrought episode in the book involves the death of a young man with whom Coates had studied at “The Mecca” – Prince C. Jones, Jr., who Coates learns was killed in an altercation with a Prince George’s County, Virginia policeman who happened to be black, and who had a dismal record in his tenure on the force. Hearing that the unarmed Jones was struck with five bullets (of 16 shots aimed at his Jeep), Coates felt a need to seek out Jones’s mother, about whom he wondered, “How did she live?” Coates found her on the outskirts of Philadelphia in an affluent gated community.

Dr. Mabel Jones made a pact with a friend as a young girl that she would become a doctor and escape the difficult childhood she had lived under her sharecropper father. She subsequently matriculated at Louisiana State University on full scholarship and later served in the Navy.

Earning her medical degree, she specialized in radiology (she said she knew no other black radiologists) and rose to the head of radiology of her hospital. She told Coates that Prince (who she called “Rocky” in tribute to her grandfather, who went by “Rock”), was part of that “one third” of Howard students who were “tired of having to represent.” They were the ones who managed to break away to the suburbs, only to find that they “carried the mark with them and could not escape” – being patronized as “parables of diversity.”

Coates can hardly believe Dr. Jones’s remarkable stoicism in telling him about the night her son died and her control in the face of his having been “plundered.” Driving back after their talk, Coates found himself thinking of his son, of the Dreamers, and of the importance of continuing to struggle. “I do not believe we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves.… Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved.” It is an appeal to empathy and understanding that has fallen on the deaf ears of so much of America throughout its history.

Coates finishes powerfully, expressing the urgent need of this understanding, together with corrective action, in one stirring passage: “The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all.”

The message here is clear: Our national conscience must acknowledge, as difficult as that may be, that there remains a steel-hardened distance between black and white in this country, forged by past and present transgressions. But at the same time, there is the hope that it can be tempered by an appeal to an America that sees itself as “exceptional,” but has failed to extend that belief in exceptionalism to many of its citizens.

“Between the World and Me” follows other important writings by Coates, including his 2008 memoir “The Beautiful Struggle” and his 2014 Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations.”

Much of what Coates writes may be difficult for a majority of Americans to process, but that’s the incisive wisdom of it. Read it, think about it, take a deep breath and read it again. The spirit of James Baldwin lives within its pages.

 

 

Cyber-attack on Power Grid Paralysis

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Cyber Attacks on the Power Grid: The Specter of Total Paralysis

Posted in General Security, Hacking, Incident Response on July 27, 2015

The Incidents

Imagine that one day you wake up and trading is halted on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) floor; meanwhile systems at United Airlines and the Wall Street Journal newspaper appear out of order.

It is not a scene from a movie; it happened on July 8, when trading at the NYSE stopped around 11:30 a.m. ET.

According the media, the temporary interruption of the services mentioned was a fateful coincidence and the events are unrelated, but the incidents have raised once again the question of the real security of critical infrastructure.

White House spokesperson Josh Earnest confirmed that the incidents weren’t caused by cyber-attacks. President Obama had briefed on the glitch at NYSE by White House counterterrorism and Homeland Security adviser Lisa Monaco as well as Chief Of Staff Denis McDonough.

“It appears from what we know at this stage that the malfunctions at United and at the stock exchange were not the result of any nefarious actor,” said Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson. “We know less about the Wall Street Journal at this point except that their system is back up again as is the United Airline system.”

Which is the impact of a cyber-attack on a critical infrastructure? Are critical infrastructure actually secure?

A major attack on a critical infrastructure like a power grid would cause chaos in the country by interrupting vital services for the population.

The current scenario

The Stock Exchange, transportation, and media are critical to the infrastructure of a country. A contemporary failure of these systems could cause serious problems to the nation, especially when the incident is caused by a cyber-attack.

“I think the Wall Street Journal piece is connected to people flooding their web site in response to the New York Exchange to find out what’s going on.” FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Intelligence committee. “In my business we don’t love coincidences, but it does appear that there is not a cyber-intrusion involved.”

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-FL, the top Democrat on the cyber-security subcommittee, told Fox News that the NYSE incident has “the appearance” of a cyber-attack and noted the coordination of multiple sites.

Thus far, the temporary outage at the New York Stock Exchange, United Airlines and the Wall Street Journal’s website were the results of tech glitches, but we have to consider the US infrastructure remains vulnerable to cyber-attacks that would cause serious problems and would be costly.

To compound the scenario, there is the rapid increase in the number of cyber-attacks, at least of those we fail to detect, and its complexity.

The DHS’s Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) has issued its new ICS-CERT MONITOR report related to the period September 2014 – February 2015. The ICS-CERT MONITOR report

According to the report, the Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) received and responded to 245 incidents in Fiscal Year 2014, more than half of the incidents reported by asset owners and industry partners involved sophisticated APT. ICS/SCADA system were also targeted by other categories of threat actors, including cyber criminals, insider threats and hacktivists.

“Of the total number of incidents reported to ICS-CERT, roughly 55 percent involved advanced persistent threats (APT) or sophisticated actors. Other actor types included hacktivists, insider threats, and criminals. In many cases, the threat actors were unknown due to a lack of attributional data.” states the report.

Analyzing incidents reported by sector, it is possible to note that the majority of the attacks involved entities in the Energy Sector followed by Critical Manufacturing. About 30 percent of the incidents hit infrastructures in the energy sector, meanwhile Critical Manufacturing (i.e. manufacturing of vehicles and aviation and aerospace components) accounted for 27 percent.

The threat actors used a significant number of zero-day vulnerabilities to compromise industrial control systems through the exploitation of web application flaws.

The most common flaws exploited by attackers include authentication, buffer overflow, and denial-of-service . Noteworthy among ICS-CERT’s activities included the multi-vendor coordination that was conducted for the ”

“Noteworthy among ICS-CERT’s activities included the multi-vendor coordination that was conducted for the “Heartbleed” OpenSSL vulnerability. The team worked with the ICS vendor community to release multiple advisories, in addition to conducting briefings and webinars in an effort to raise awareness of the vulnerability and the mitigation strategies for preventing exploitation” states the ICS-CERT report to explain the coordination activities sustained by the agency to address principal vulnerabilities.

The ICS-CERT MONITOR report confirmed that the attackers used a vast range of methods for attempting to compromise control systems infrastructure, including:

Figure 1 – ICS -CERT Attack Methods

Unfortunately, it is quite difficult to attribute an incident to a specific threat actor. In the majority of cases, these offensives have gone under the radar over the years due to high level of sophistication of the Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs).

The victims were not able to identify the threat actors. Neither the attack vector exploited by hackers for 38 percent of the reported incidents,

“Many more incidents occur in critical infrastructure that go unreported,” states the ICS-CERT MONITOR report. “Forensic evidence did not point to a method used for intrusion because of a lack of detection and monitoring capabilities within the compromised network”.

US power grid vulnerable to cyber attacks

The US power grid is a privileged target for various categories of attackers, terrorists, cyber criminals, and state-sponsored hackers. Daily, they threaten the backbone of the American society. Security experts and US politicians are aware that the national power grid is vulnerable to a terrorist attack.

“It’s possible; and whether it’s likely to happen soon remains to be seen,” explained by the former Secretary of Defense William Cohen“ on “The Steve Malzberg Show.”

Attackers have several options to hit a power grid, from a cyber-attack on SCADA systems to an EMP attack, according to Cohen.

“You can do it through cyber-attacks, and that’s the real threat coming up as well. We have to look at cyber-attacks being able to shut down our power grid, which you have to remember is in the private sector’s hands, not the government’s. And we’re vulnerable,” Cohen added. “It’s possible and whether it’s likely to happen soon remains to be seen.”

“That’s because the technology continues to expand and terrorism has become democratized. Many, many people across the globe now have access to information that allows them to be able to put together a very destructive means of carrying out their terrorist plans. We’re better at detecting than we were in the past. We’re much more focused in integrating and sharing the information that we have, but we’re still vulnerable and we’ll continue to be vulnerable as long as groups can operate either on the margins or covertly to build these kind of campaigns of terror.” said Cohen.

Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano shared Cohen’s concerns. A major cyber-attack the power grid was a matter of “when,” not “if.”

State-sponsored hackers, cyber terrorists are the main threat actors, but as confirmed by a recent research conducted by TrendMicro, also the cybercrime represents a serious menace.

Former senior CIA analyst and EMP Task Force On National Homeland Security Director, Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, told Newsmax TV that that a cyber attack against the power grid could cause serious destruction and loss of life.

Not only US power grid are under attack. In January 2015, the British Parliament revealed that UK Power Grid is under cyber-attack from foreign hackers, but the emergency is for critical infrastructure worldwide.\

Figure 2 – SCADA control room

Arbuthnot confirmed the incessant attacks on national critical infrastructure and he doesn’t exclude a major incident, despite the enormous effort spent at the National Grid.

“Our National Grid is coming under cyber-attack not just day-by-day but minute-by-minute,” Arbuthnot, whose committee scrutinized the country’s security policy, told a conference in London last year. “There are, at National Grid, people of very high quality who recognize the risks that these attacks pose, and who are fighting them off,” he said, “but we can’t expect them to win forever.”

The power grid is a vital system for our society and the cyber strategy of every government must consider its protection a high priority, a terror attack would leave entire countries sitting in the dark.

A hypothetical attack scenario and estimation of the losses

What will happen in case of a cyber-attack on a critical infrastructure in the US? Which is the economic impact of a cyber-attack against a power grid?

According to a poll conducted by researchers at the Morning Consult firm from May 29 to May 31, cyber-attacks are just behind terrorism attacks on the list of biggest threats to US. The research allowed the experts to estimate that the insurance industry could face losses of about $21 billion. That poll was conducted by interviewing a national sample of 2,173 registered voters.

Nearly 36 percent of voters consider acts of terrorism at the top of a list of major security threats, followed by cyber-attacks at 32 percent.

Figure 3- Morning Consult firm poll results

The Lloyd’s of London has conducted a very interesting study, Business Blackout, that describes the impacts of a cyber-attack on the national power grid.

It is the first time that the insurance industry has elaborated on a similar report. Obviously, the estimates provided are merely indicative due to the large number of factors that can influence the costs.

According to the report prepared by Lloyd’s of London in a joint effort with the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Risk Studies, cyber-attacks would have a catastrophic impact on multiple types of insurance.

The attack scenario described by Business Blackout illustrates the effects of a malware-based attack on systems that controls the national power grid. The attack causes an electrical blackout that plunges 15 US states and principal cities, including New York City and Washington DC, into darkness. Nearly 93 million people will remain without power in the scenario hypothesized by the study.

The attackers spread the ‘Erebos’ Trojan through the network with the effect of compromising the electricity generation control rooms in several locations in the Northeastern United States.

According to the researchers, the attack will cause health and safety systems to fail, disrupting water supplies as electric pumps fail. The chaos will reign causing the failure of main services, including transportation. The malware is able to infect the Internet and search and compromise 50 generators that it will destroy, causing prolonged outages in the region.

The total of claims paid by the insurance industry has been estimated to be included in the interval comprised between $21.4b and $71.1b, depending on the evolution of the scenarios designed by the researchers.

The researchers involved in the simulation have calculated the economic losses could range from $243 million to $1 trillion, depending on the number of components in the power grid compromised by the attack.

“Economic impacts include direct damage to assets and infrastructure, decline in sales revenue to electricity supply companies, loss of sales revenue to business and disruption to the supply chain. The total impact to the US economy is estimated at $243bn, rising to more than $1trn in the most extreme version of the scenario.” states the report.

The experts analyzed the historical outages, estimating that currently the power interruptions, most of which last five minutes or less, already cost the US about $96 billion. The cost related to a prolonged outage is likely to be included in the range of $36 billion to $156 billion. The Commercial and industrial sectors are the sectors most impacted by the attack on the power grid due to their dependency on the electricity supply.

“Evidence from historical outages and indicative modelling suggests that power interruptions already cost the US economy roughly $96bn8 annually.9 However, uncertainty and sensitivity analysis suggest this figure may range from $36b to $156b.” continues the report. “Currently over 95% of outage costs are borne by the commercial and industrial sectors due to the high dependence on electricity as an input factor of production.”

As explained in the report, it is important to identify the risks related to a possible cyber-attack and adopt all the necessary measures to mitigate them. The protection of critical infrastructure like a power grid is an essential part of the cyber strategy of any Government.