Two case histories:
The first case is one of many documented examples of Internet hacking of American infrastructure:
Chinese hackers recently spent nearly a year deep inside a public power utility in Littleton, Massachusetts. U.S. officials said it was part of a large-scale plan to destabilize American infrastructure in the event of a future conflict. Hackers linked to Iran previously breached several U.S. municipal water utilities as well. Now over 50,000 public water treatment plants across the United States are hoping to stop attacks like that from happening to them.
The second case involves using AI agents to reverse engineer websites:
There are several documented cases where AI agents have been used to reverse engineer corporate or corporate-like websites, often for purposes like understanding functionality, identifying vulnerabilities, or analyzing strategies. These typically involve AI-driven tools that interact with the site’s UI, APIs, network traffic, or content without direct access to the source code. Below are some real-world examples based on reported experiments and applications. Note that these are often conducted in controlled or ethical contexts, such as research or security testing, and reverse engineering can raise legal and ethical considerations depending on the intent and permissions. (Grok)
We are used to the term “ransomware” where a group of people break into a site to blackmail an institution or government agency to regain control of their information. Hacking includes breaking into systems with sleeper agents that launch coordinated attacks on the infrastructure of a country at very little cost.
What would I do to attack an enemy? I would use AI agents to identify infrastructure that is vital for local resources such as water, sewer and electrical utilities as shown in the second case outlined above. Transportation (trucking, railroad and airlines) would also be identified. I would then direct AI agents to find backdoors or administrative passwords to give me control whenever the time is “appropriate” to launch a coordinated shutdown.
I am not writing this as a suggestion for a course of action: I am writing this to warn people that this is already done. We have seen too many examples over the past twenty years with hackers.
Over 11 billion records exposed since 2005, with costs in the trillions (e.g., $4.1B for healthcare alone in 2012). (Grok)
Why would we assume that they did not make their task easier with AI agents? Then again, one EMP could still take down our electrical grid since Congress did not authorize any hardening of our system.
2 responses to “Asymmetric Warfare”
Yeah, the war will come home here in spades if it manages to go on long enough. The talk of sleeper cells shooting up malls and churches is probably overstated. The self-selecting sudden jihad types that we have seen in the past week can do plenty of that. The useful work for the real sleeper cells is the infrastructure damage you outlined.
The hijinks carried out in Russia by our intelligence agencies under the Ukrainian “cover” illustrates the current state of asymmetric drone attacks far from the battlefront or even national boundaries. Our leadership in and out of uniform seems to have not considered this type of thing being played back upon us. Pop-up drone attacks can take out a B-2 Bomber Squadron in Missouri as easily as they can take out parked TU-95 Bear bombers in Russia. Wait for it, unless the B-2’s get shot down over Iran beforehand. There is no shortage of vulnerable targets for them though. I am wondering to myself how redundant the satellite uplink/downlink stations for our space assets are.
the fact that they refuse to harden the power grid is another ‘sin’ of Congress against the American people