America's Air Force Is Guarding Against Electromagnetic Pulse Attacks. Should We Worry? (space.com) 142
An anonymous reader shared this report from Live Science:
A U.S. Air Force base in Texas has taken the first steps to guard against an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack. But what, exactly, is an EMP, and how big is the threat...? An EMP is a massive burst of electromagnetic energy that can occur naturally or be generated deliberately using nuclear weapons. While many experts don't think EMPs pose a big threat, some people argue that these types of weapons could be used to cause widespread disruption to electricity-dependent societies.
"You can use a single weapon to collapse the entire North American power grid," said defense analyst Peter Pry, who served on the Congressional EMP Commission, which was set up to assess the threat of EMP attacks but shut down in 2017. "Once the electric grid goes down, everything would collapse," Pry told Live Science. "Everything depends on electricity: telecommunications, transportation, even water.... We've arrived at a place where a single individual can topple the technological pillars of civilization for a major metropolitan area all by himself armed with some device like this," he said...
The threat posed by EMPs is far from settled, though. A 2019 report by the Electric Power Research Institute, which is funded by utility companies, found that such an attack would probably cause regional blackouts but not a nationwide grid failure and that recovery times would be similar to those of other large-scale outages... "There are other ways that adversaries can achieve some of the same outcomes, some of which would be cheaper and some of which would be less discernible," Frank Cilluffo, director of Auburn University's McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security, told Live Science. Such alternatives might include cyberattacks to take out critical infrastructure, including the electric grid, or even efforts to disrupt space-based communications or the GPS system that modern society is so reliant on.
Work to protect against EMPs makes sense... but these upgrades shouldn't distract from efforts to shore up defenses against more probable lines of attack, Cilluffo said.
"You can use a single weapon to collapse the entire North American power grid," said defense analyst Peter Pry, who served on the Congressional EMP Commission, which was set up to assess the threat of EMP attacks but shut down in 2017. "Once the electric grid goes down, everything would collapse," Pry told Live Science. "Everything depends on electricity: telecommunications, transportation, even water.... We've arrived at a place where a single individual can topple the technological pillars of civilization for a major metropolitan area all by himself armed with some device like this," he said...
The threat posed by EMPs is far from settled, though. A 2019 report by the Electric Power Research Institute, which is funded by utility companies, found that such an attack would probably cause regional blackouts but not a nationwide grid failure and that recovery times would be similar to those of other large-scale outages... "There are other ways that adversaries can achieve some of the same outcomes, some of which would be cheaper and some of which would be less discernible," Frank Cilluffo, director of Auburn University's McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security, told Live Science. Such alternatives might include cyberattacks to take out critical infrastructure, including the electric grid, or even efforts to disrupt space-based communications or the GPS system that modern society is so reliant on.
Work to protect against EMPs makes sense... but these upgrades shouldn't distract from efforts to shore up defenses against more probable lines of attack, Cilluffo said.
Yes (Score:2)
Soo, how many Data enters need to be EMPed to bring the western economy to its knees? 10? Less?
Re: Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot. Most hyperscale providers deploy in an AZ (availability zone) configuration and so actually causing an outage would require taking down three data centers in a particular region. And then the outage would be regional and potentially only for a single provider.
That said there are definitely hot spots in North America for DCs and taking ALL of the data centers out in those regions (there are about 5 I can think of) would be devastating.
If that happened carriers would work with service providers to re-route to European locations. It would be a lot slower but within a few days services would start to come back online. Data would be lost forever but functionality would continue to exist.
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So 3 each? Perfect. That requires 9 strikes to take down Amazon, Azure and whoever number 3 is. And since they do not have offsite backups other than their other DCs, this seems to be an exceptionally cheap attack for a devastating effect.
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No. Three per region, per provider, per service. At a minimum. You're going to need 50-100 tactical, or 5 that are big enough to take out everything within 200 miles of the target. In short the coordination involved would be too much for any organization other that a major state actor and at that point they would just nuke the aforementioned regions and have to deal with the mutually assured destruction that followed. Interesting idea, but a precision strategic attack on data centers with an EMP is not
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That is not what they actually offer.
Re: Yes (Score:4, Insightful)
EMP pulse means one nuke high up (300-500 km) over Kansas taking out most of N. America's electronics, rather then attacking infrastructure directly. There's disagreement about the size of the nuke, some say a small one (10KT) is all that is needed, plans called for 1-10 MT to be sure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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> No nation-state
Good to know... just go stateless before the attack.
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And then what? The US Navy's attack submarines level your cities 15 minutes later.
No nation-state is going to attack the US with an EMP or anything else because they'd all die immediately.
If you know who the attacker was, that is.
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The radar track of the missile carrying the warhead to that altitude would be a dead giveaway...
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You mean no sane leader of a nation state
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I am not privileged to know what criteria POTUS has to start an all out nuclear war. But I doubt that an EMP attack, which does not kill people except by their dependency on electricity (like patients in hospitals), and over a longer time by cutting off water, etc., is considered justification for dropping nukes on cities. More likely, I would guess, would be to retaliate with an EMP attack on the attacker's country. (I suspect which country did it would be clear; there is a small number of countries tha
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There is also the thing that a small EMP attack may well be within the capabilities of a smaller nation and may represent a threat credible enough to make MAD accessible to more than just the traditional nuclear opponents. If you just need to be able to deliver a few low-yield devices, the whole equation changes fundamentally.
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There is also the thing that a small EMP attack may well be within the capabilities of a smaller nation and may represent a threat credible enough to make MAD accessible to more than just the traditional nuclear opponents.
One day, undoubtedly. Right now? No, not even close.
Developing a nuclear weapon is a less difficult than developing the ICBM required to carry it.
Re: Yes (Score:4, Informative)
No, an EMP is a short burst of electromagnetic energy across many frequencies. Basically as the burst travels through conductive elements a pulse charge is generated, the conductive elements must align with the burst for maximum build up of charge, changing direction of the conductive element can reduce the build up of energy. You do not need nukes, https://www.wikihow.com/Build-... [wikihow.com].
So they can be used near major computer infrastructure projects to crash them hard. Depending upon the energy output of the device as to how far out the damaging current inducing pulse will generate.
Ultimately it is the expect response of excessive disruptive hacking, as a counter attack EMP the crap out of a major metropolitan area and let the chaos ensue. Now of course the sun is the cruellest creator of them all, a major solar flare and the side of the planet exposed to it when it arrives, is going to go do hard, REAL HARD, for months, total chaos. Mass rioting, starvation, Americans killing Americans for what ever they can steal.
We are bound to electronics now and when they go down for an extended period we are in REAL trouble, seriously fucked up chaos. Especially because they allowed digital methods to replace all manual methods of paper work, ordering stuff, getting it delivered et al. So they wont be able to order the computer bits, to have them delivered to repair the computer bits because all the computer bits to do this are broken and no manual method, no phone calls possible, most cars dead, real chaos.
Re: Yes (Score:2)
There are intermediate devices between the table top version and the nuke version.
Enter the explosively pumped flux compression generator.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
Would have to place them strategically, but they could do the trick.
Re: Yes (Score:2)
EMP pulse
EMP pulse is a means to disable all the ATM machines. No need to remember your PIN number number afterwards.
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If you get the devices in there on the ground, that is both easy and not required. And who says this even has to be a nuke...
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And how would you do that at those 9 locations simultaneously?
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I am not going to carry out such an attack and neither are you. But do you really think this is hard if you have the right people for the job? I do not.
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The last well coordinated attack was 9/11, and even then, it was hard to coordinate because after the first three planes went down, word got out and prevented the fourth from doing any serious damage. Unless you can coordinate all 9
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If you get the devices in there on the ground...
A nuclear device detonated in space generates a destructive EMP over a wide area. What you are suggesting would either be a ground burst or a non-nuclear device which might take out a building or three. A tactical attack.
Good luck carrying out nine attacks in exact simultaneity so as to not alert the other locations or the military.
For a strategic attack that effects infrastructure at scale, one would add the nukes to government built and launched satellites for spying, telecommunications, geological and environmental imaging, climate change monitoring. Then, one can detonate a chain of devices over one's target(s).
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The E1 pulse of a high altitude explosive generates voltages of around 50kv/m of conductor.
Lines burst into flames, and transformers physically explode.
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Re: Yes (Score:5, Informative)
It has to do with the fact that the gamma output of the weapon is able to strip off the electrons in the atmosphere over a very large distance due to the sparsity of it.
This then creates an electric charge across a huge swath of the atmosphere that due to magnetic field lines, then blasts downward toward the planet at relativistic speeds.
Low altitude detonations involve the gamma output being absorbed very quickly and turn the air in the fireball area into plasma, but of limited size.
This means that you trade the energy that would have gone into making a firewall for creating a continental-scale electrical field.
Sauce. [wikipedia.org] The part you're going to want to read about is the E1 pulse. It's the nasty one.
When the US tested their high altitude detonations during Starship Prime, they blew up street lights in Hawaii 900 miles away.
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For what it's worth, it looks like the earth's magnetic field acts as a bit of a lens, focusing the electrons into a U-shaped cloud by the time it gets to the ground. So 1/r^2 losses don't really apply.
Yeesh.
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For what it's worth, it looks like the earth's magnetic field acts as a bit of a lens
In a way.
The electrons would normally scatter randomly as the gamma rays ionized the atmosphere, but instead they're directed downward at very high velocity- roughly half the energy of the gamma that hit it, so for 2MeV photons, you get 1MeV electrons, which comes out to really effing fast, and mostly directed downwards. The voltage is a function of how many electrons are created, which is dependent upon how much prompt gamma radiation the weapon releases at the moment of detonation.
Even if 1/r^2 directly
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Why would you presume that there aren't offsite backups?
It's stupidly easy to send backups, drive snapshots, database dumps, etc. securely to completely different regions in most cloud providers. Why wouldn't I keep an encrypted backup in Frankfort and Sydney, for example, when it's a trivial amount of scripting to do it, and a trivial amount of money added to the bill? And if you've built your cloud application platform properly, most of what it would take is executing some Terraform to get your platform
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Yeah, individual "end-user" organisations tend to have multiple primary/DR sites, although if you lose a primary and its DR recovery time to another site tends to be slower than a normal DR scenario.
However, if they're running in the cloud they could lose a continent and still be back up and running in a few minutes.
If you really need to shut someone down, target the interconnects.
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A while back (20 years ago) our small server room (about a dozen servers and a SANS, and network gear) got hit by lighting directly. The power went straight from the ground to the equipment. It ended up burning out 2 power supplies, and about 6 ports on a switch. Nearly all the system rebooted, from as the UPS actually decided it was a bad idea to keep power when it too got a really bad surge. We replaced the power supplies, and rewired the switch to the working ports, and less than an hour we were back
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EMP and a surge on the lines are different beasts.
An EMP pulse skips straight past the UPS and lets the chips fry themselves entirely irrespective of the power coming from the UPS.
chances are most of the equipment will still work
This is true. Finding out which bits did and didn't would however take quite some time.
Power grid, not Data centres (Score:2)
how many Data enters need to be EMPed to bring the western economy to its knees? 10? Less?
An EMP is very unlikely to cause any permanent damage to a data centre unless detonated inside it. The metal racks, metal cases and metal roof and floor tiles should provide multiple levels of Faraday shielding. The main effect of an EMP will not be to damage electronics but to knock out the power grid. While this will shutdown data centres that is not going to be foremost on people's minds.
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You should have been in Nashville this past Christmas. One conventional bomb outside of an AT&T switching station brought havoc you would not believe.
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I've been to multiple data centres. Some of them have cages within them to segregate specific racks and servers, but any wholly owned ones tend to be large concrete buildings with raised floors and a high energy footprint. No steel cage.
US military has taken EMP seriously for 50 years (Score:5, Informative)
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What the army really needs is EMP hardened MREs.
Re:US military has taken EMP seriously for 50 year (Score:4, Funny)
What the army really needs is EMP hardened MREs.
Isn't that how they normally come?
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What the army really needs is EMP hardened MREs.
Isn't that how they normally come?
Yup, and they're made pre-stale so they can't get any worse while they're sitting in the commissary.
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I remember in the 90s they had TV shows about the threat, and there were always some idiots that would talk about it for the next few years.
Now I do a lot of engineering that involves Faraday's Law, so I don't worry about it very much. But I do shield a lot of my electronics.
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My understanding is that EMT projectiles are a thing and have been a thing for a many decades, and are designed to disrupt onboard electronics to the point the vehicle is inoperable. So significant effort goes in to EMP hardening the electronics and providing redundancies that would, in theory, not all be hit with the same strike.
The idea that EMP is a threat is not hard to make at all. But the hollywood movie style "magic EMP blast that halts the earth" is exceptionally unlikely. The real threat are more t
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My understanding is that EMT projectiles are a thing
They're a theoretical thing. An EMP Mk.84 costs at least an order of magnitude more than a standard one, and does a tiny fraction of the damage of even a Mk.82. In addition because of their specialised/exotic nature you're typically dropping a single one of them rather than just unloading a bay full of Mk82s, which take out more than just the electronics at a fraction of the cost.
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True this. My dad (PhD Physics) was actively working on this at Sylvania in the 70's & 80's
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I worked on US Army Pershing missiles in 1970-1973. We were installing EMP protection retrofit kits on the missile equipment back then.
I hear that the US military has been working on EMP protection ever since the scientists at a nuclear bomb test site, after a test, went to drive home and found out that none of the cars with the then-new transistorized ignition system would start.
I also heard that GM has a test cell where they hit a car with a magnetic pulse strong enough to bend the fenders. A new ignitio
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The thing is most above ground nuclear tests ended by 1970, with exception of maybe China. So we have no real world experience with our current level of electrical and electronic deployment. Military hardware is certainly shielded. As we see with recent massive power failures in California and Texas
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after it happens you may be drafted (Score:4, Insightful)
after it happens you may be drafted
EMP has always been a factor to harden for (Score:3)
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"Why IT firms haven't looked to survivability is beyond me."
Can ya say Solarwinds? I knew ya could.
IT is a COST center. It is not seen a essential for the business.
With money people running everything, end of story.
Just remember, focus on your core competency!
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Why has IT not addressed into EMP survivability?
Off site co-lo for disaster recovery is actually a decent approach.
Would you want a "functional" organization in a "technology could work" situation in a world where everything else breaks? Power would be out. Water would go out. Hopefully the natural gas would stop. Employees would be stuck at home without power, gas stations would lose power (generators won't be running). Cell service is out. StarLink is down.
And a better precursor question would be "w
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Tempest (Score:2)
This could be an exaggeration of Tempest which is simply surrounding electronics with a Faraday cage so spies can't "listen" in on communications or computing.
Worrying ... (Score:3)
Work to protect against EMPs makes sense... but these upgrades shouldn't distract from efforts to shore up defenses against more probable lines of attack, Cilluffo said.
The US also plans for a war with Britain, the Pentagon plans for all kinds of shit. If we worried about all of it we'd be buying anti-anxiety meds by the pound.
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Shouldn't we be buying by the dollar?
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"The US also plans for a war with Britain, the Pentagon plans for all kinds of shit. If we worried about all of it we'd be buying anti-anxiety meds by the pound."
Shouldn't we be buying by the dollar?
Not if you are Britain and you find out that the US is planning how to wage war against you.
Old news. (Score:3, Insightful)
EMI and EMPs have been considered a threat as long as we've been putting computers in aircraft. Nuclear detonations cause an EMP burst and results in heavy ambient EMI so being prepared for them is nothing new. Military equipment is made to be as robust as possible with EMI resistance second only to aerospace components and designs.
Should we be worried? Not really because the only thing that can cause a large EMP is destructive in nature, meaning it can only be used once. Yes, it'll take down the grid and probably break some things but if you can't live with power for a handful of hours then perhaps you should invest in going off grid and being purely dependent on solar power.
Old sunspots. (Score:2)
Problems caused by sunspots would be a greater issue than nukes.
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Re:Old news. (Score:5, Interesting)
Lightning causes greater voltage gradients than nuclear detonations. Although more localized than an airburst, lightning reaches the breakdown voltage of the atmosphere. Because after all, that's what lightning is. We design aircraft to withstand lightning. Not just Air Force, but civilian craft.
As far as power grids go; Yeah, we will be without power for hours or days. But some of the worst events are geomagnetic storms. Having effects across the globe. Not just hundreds of miles. And following some major events [wikipedia.org] resulting in significant outages, much work has gone into protecting the power grid infrastructure. We will still lose power. But the system will suffer minimum damage, allowing restoration without having to rebuild a lot of it.
In discussing EMP hardening with several people, a lot of our data seems to go back to the Starfish Prime [wikipedia.org] test in the Pacific. It turns out that the only significant damage to utility equipment was to street light circuits in Hawaii. Which were of an unusual configuration (series loop) that made them overly susceptible to EMP/geomagnetic effects. We don't wire stuff up like that any more.
Telephone circuits were once a problem as well. With miles of open wire circuits potentially affected. But copper subscriber loops are typically twisted pair (much less susceptible) and only hundreds of yards long from the fiber system interface.
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Lightning causes greater voltage gradients than nuclear detonations.
Probably not if you are close enough to the detonation. The difference is that if you are that close to a nuclear detonation it's not just the EMP that is going to cause damage.
Is Miniaturization making us more vulnerable? (Score:2)
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Or at least, the ones not inside metal cases.
It only needs a script kiddie (Score:5, Interesting)
There are other ways that adversaries can achieve some of the same outcomes, some of which would be cheaper and some of which would be less discernible,"
There is a story that China hacked the Indian power grid in reprisal for their recent border skirmishes.
It looks like there is no need for nuclear or other devices to take out the grid with an EMP. I doubt that the american power system is any better defended against a cyber attack that any other country's. As long as critical systems are accessible through an ordinary internet connection all it needs is for someone with a grudge and a bit of luck and the lights go off.
Carrington Event, anyone? (Score:2)
As the old saying goes, "Those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it." Nation-wide energy grids and the internet didn't exist In 1859, but a powerful solar flare took down telegraph lines, set telegraph paper on fire and shocked operators.
A similar event today would disrupt our power grids, take down the internet, destroy satellites and generally wreak havoc on our digital infrastructure. In such a situation, having a functional force that can assist in the recovery would be insanely valuabl
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The only question is "when" not "if" it will happen.
Oh, well no problem then. With our out of control spending, can kicking solutions to solving it, and the country split 50/50 on the very nature of who we are as a nation, we'll probably no longer exist by the time this issue pops up again.
Whoever is around to pick up the pieces will at least have funtioning military equipment afterward.
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Telegraph lines were especially susceptible as it was an electrically continuous wire spanning very long distances that relied on fairly low voltages to operate normally. Due to the use of fiber, twisted pairs, coax, shielding, and other things that aren’t specifically designed to deal with EMPs, much of the threat has been eliminated.
What remains are transmission and sub-transmission lines, where you could potentially have enough of a voltage differential to cause problems. My (limited) understandi
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As the old saying goes, "Those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it." Nation-wide energy grids and the internet didn't exist In 1859, but a powerful solar flare took down telegraph lines, set telegraph paper on fire and shocked operators.
This is way overblown. If you take the time to look into what happened beyond the sensational headlines there were only localized momentary outages and little real damage despite the piss poor architecture and protection circuitry of the time.
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Anyone in the power industry care to comment?
Man portable EMP guns already exist (Score:2)
They target small electronic vehicles, such as drones or perhaps medium sized things like ground vehicles, aircraft, and small ships.
Just because a bunch of idiots think a 'scifi' weapon has to target whole cities does not mean we do not already have ones that can target US military vehicles.
So when people hear EMP they think World War III, when they should be thinking small unit tactics.
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You seem to think that all government routinely announce when their most powerful weapons programs prove that they work. Yes, they never keep secrets. And you clearly are an expert on what USA, Russia, Japan, China, and Germany are working on.
They are clearly working on it, and you personally can create non-weaponized examples that can disrupt small hand held devices such as calculators.
https://www.hackster.io/kedarn... [hackster.io]
F-14 fluid computer anyone? (Score:2)
I remember reading somewhere that F-14 Tomcat had a backup fluid computer to be able to survive an EMP. I just can't find any reference about that. Any link is appreciated.
EMP agsainst drone (Score:2)
Possible effects of EMP (Score:2)
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Yeah, to me that book ranked second behind "On The Beach" for being apocalyptically thought-provoking.
"One Second After" is the title, btw. No 59 second grace period lol.
Solar EMP events (Score:2)
A serious EMP occurred in 1859. https://www.spacelegalissues.c... [spacelegalissues.com] It took out telegraph systems.
Yes, worry (Score:2)
The cold war EMP hardening has finally reached Texas, 50 years late.
Our biggest enemy - THE SUN (Score:2)
Yes, we need EMP hardening. The Ruskies are our least threat. Biggest threat: SOL.
This. The Carrington Event.
Not new news (Score:2)
The US started (re)hardening strategic assets after the publication of the fictional book "One Second After" and the Congressional hearings it wrought.
Um...what? (Score:2)
If the USAF is in 2021 just taking steps to protect against EMP, then they're even more ridiculously behind the curve than even I expected.
Pretty sure EMP hardening has been something the US military has been implementing since the 1960s at all levels.
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The US military would know exactly which country the attack originated from. Do you think we would just shrug and get to work fixing things?
The US military has been EMP hardening things since they first found out nuclear weapons damage equipment electrically. It has nothing to do with knowing which country attacked you, but everything to do with making sure your equipment still works in battle.
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But for civilian locations, if an EMP attack was considered, that would mean the two countries were in irreconcilable diplomatic fallout for a long time; with the global understanding that war is about to start. At which point, why use an EMP when you can send the nuke itself to the power station?
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A 1MT nuke at 500 miles can knock out power for the entire country, with a restoration time measured in months.
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If you launch one nuke and knock out the power, the military still has the machinery and fire power to wipe out whichever country sent the lone nuke.
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There are better targets if one can realistically wipe out the infrastructure of a country.
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If you're going to use a nuke, you'd be starting a nuclear war. And if you are starting a nuclear war, you have to be prepared to end a nuclear war. If your strategy is to wipe out the electrical infrastructure with a NUKE, then your strategy must include wiping out the military with a nuke as well. If you wipe out t
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Tell me, which country would be so stupid as to just destroy the electrical infrastructure of a country, knowing full well that that country's military can still wipe them out in retaliation?
None of course. It would only be used as part of a full scale nuclear war. Don't recall arguing otherwise.
The Air Force needs to worry about such things.
If you're going to use a nuke, you'd be starting a nuclear war. And if you are starting a nuclear war, you have to be prepared to end a nuclear war. If your strategy is to wipe out the electrical infrastructure with a NUKE, then your strategy must include wiping out the military with a nuke as well. If you wipe out the electrical infrastructure, then the whole country may as well go into total war to defeat the enemy, since there's no economy to save anymore.
No military power on this planet can wipe out an enemy military with their nuclear weaponry. That's not how they work.
You go for infrastructure.
At which point, like I said, you'd just nuke all the important targets anyway - civilian AND military targets, and civilians - to wipe out their capacity to retaliate.
In the case of a nuclear war, you have a limited amount of warheads. You can only do *so* much damage. You want to maximize that damage. Wasting every warhead you have on 20% of a country's power plants is not the
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Instead, you utilize 1 to wipe out that country's electrical power and use the rest to target population centers and military targets.
So, like we said, you wouldn't bother sending just one nuke, you'd send multiple. And since you'd be sending multiple, an EMP attack would be pointless, since you'd be causing way more destruction.
That's what makes an EMP attack unlikely, because you'd probably be in all out war before then.
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So, like we said, you wouldn't bother sending just one nuke, you'd send multiple. And since you'd be sending multiple, an EMP attack would be pointless, since you'd be causing way more destruction.
This is fucking nonsense. I explained the reasoning to you, but you simply ignored it.
That's what makes an EMP attack unlikely, because you'd probably be in all out war before then.
An EMP attack would be part of a war.
It's a massive force multiplier for a warhead, though one with a one-time use.
The Airforce is preparing for that because their generals are apparently a lot better than you at determining what threats exist to their ability to project force.
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I mean, I would. But that's my job. There are other people whose job is to retaliate. We can do two things at once!
Re:TL;DR (Score:5, Funny)
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Haha. You win the internet.
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haha, meanwhile more than half the other states have much worse winters than Texas and stay up. They're just an example of a stupid grid.