Richard Clarke is sounding the alarm about another kind of 9/11

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

https://www.fastcompany.com/90378700/richard-clarke-is-sounding-the-alarm-about-another-kind-of-9-11

By Alex Pasternack
Fast Company
July 27, 2019

Richard Clarke knows a few things about clear and present dangers. He had 
already served under six presidents and been appointed the U.S.’s first 
counterterrorism czar when he joined the George W. Bush White House, but when 
he tried to alert important decision-makers before September 11 about the 
threat of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, those warnings were largely ignored. 
(Afterwards, he famously apologized publicly for the government’s failures.) 
These days, Clarke is still trying to get people to think hard about the next 
big attack—the cyber version—and all the ones that have already happened.

Clarke’s new book, The Fifth Domain, written with cyber expert and fellow White 
House veteran Robert Knake, is in many ways a follow-up to a book they wrote in 
2012 called Cyber War. That book was derided by some at the time as science 
fiction, Clarke laments; now he has the benefit of a sci-fi-like series of 
developments to illustrate his case. And yet, while we’ve been blindsided by a 
slew of giant hacks, thefts, and attacks, the prospect of a Cyber 9/11 or Cyber 
Pearl Harbor is still hard to grasp. Maybe those are the wrong metaphors.

As Eric Rosenbach, a former Pentagon cyberczar, tells the authors, “The big 
cyberattack is going to be something that undermines our democracy in a way 
that leads Americans to question the viability of our system.”

Clarke says that’s exactly what happened in 2016, when Russian agents hacked 
emails, spread propaganda, and launched attacks on voting systems to interfere 
with the U.S. election, and we can expect a lot more of that going forward. He 
also worries cyberwar could lead to a shooting war too, especially now that the 
Trump administration has taken a more aggressive stance to confrontations in 
this new, fifth domain of warfare. “Every time I see the U.S. and Iran getting 
closer to something, I worry that it could get out of control because I don’t 
think we’re ready,” he says.

[...]

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