Ways $460 million military contract for cyber bombs could attack targets

Defense contractors will compete for a $460 million contract to develop critical infrastructure cyber bombs. The CEO of Indegy provided insight into potential ways cyber weapons could attack targets as well as what can be done to protect against them. For years, the U.S. has expressed concerns about potentially tainted supply chains. Some of the tech contained ‘trapdoors’ for espionage. Yet according to Fidelis Cybersecurity CSO Justin Harvey, Chinese state-sponsored attackers, in recent times have been “leaving behind something much more sinister: logic-bombs. The theory is that these logic-bombs are being left behind so that in the event of a military strike, China would have the capability to render its foes incapacitated. It’s no secret that critical infrastructure in the U.S. is vulnerable. Taking out the power grid could be deadly; at least it appeared to be so in the secret demo of a simulated cyberattack on New York City, causing the city to go dark during a scenario of being in the midst of a killer heat wave; “thousands” of people theoretically would have died. A different FEMA training scenario had hacktivists using zero-day attacks on America’s infrastructure; that came after Homeland Security warned that hacktivists could point, click and destroy industrial control systems.