Democrat Warns of Cyber Threat to US Infrastructure
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Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call(WASHINGTON) — Last week, the Department of Homeland Security revealed that a “Trojan Horse” malware program has penetrated software that runs much of the nation’s critical infrastructure and could set off an economic catastrophe.
On ABC This Week Sunday, Rhode Island Democratic Congressman Jim Langevin warned that the threat is very real and potentially devastating.
According to the lawmaker, “You could see a whole sector of the country without electricity for a period of not just days or weeks, but potentially months, because these generators are large. They’re not just like batteries that are sitting on a shelf, that you can take one out and plug another one in. These generators take months to build, ship and install.”
As of now, nation states, such as Russia, have cyber weapons and the know-how to launch these attacks but they likely won’t.
However, Langevin says the real concern is al Qaeda or the Islamic State getting their hands on these weapons because they wouldn’t hesitate to use them.
At best, Langevin says it’s a problem that can really only be managed, rather than solved. One important step Congress can take, he said, is passing an information-sharing bill that “would allow classified threat information to be passed to the private sector and for the private sector to pass the threats…or the attacks that they’re experiencing back to the government so that information could be more widely shared.”
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