Something I have been starting to think about recently is the possibility of a massive terrorist attack in the United States if we take out a strong response to Iran. The primary thing I base this on is the threat issued by Iran to the United States not too long ago. It struck me as odd and unrealistic, unless thy were planning something on a large scale that could do a lot of damage before it was contained. I think the strong response by Israel may have them rethinking this.
Iran saw what happened to Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, and Iran is (not yet) a nuclear power. Iran knows that any major terrorist strike within the US that can be tied to them will result in Iran being flattened. Iran is not so stupid. There’s a reason they’ve stuck to hitting targets outside the US.
What is a “massive” terrorist attack? 10 events in 10 cities that kill a few hundred people each? There are 350 million Americans. Over 2 million of whom work for DoD and will be ordered to respond appropriately.
The biggest thing(s) Iran could possibly accomplish to harm the domestic USA would be the teeniest of pinpricks on a national scale. And would result in utter, total, complete Armageddon for their government. Not necessarily nuclear and not necessarily that afternoon. But they would experience invountary regime change within a year tops.
I don’t know why you’d entertain this silly fantasy of an overtly Iranian attack in the USA, but that’s what it is.
This is what I have been thinking until recently. If 1,000 terrorists willing to risk their lives carried out a series of large scale attacks over a given length of time based on our responses could that change that dynamic?
Just out of curiosity, is air space restricted over areas with large events going on?
This is kind of what I was expecting to happen in the weeks and months following 9/11, but that never happened. It’s apparently quite difficult to pull off something like that.
But, I then believed, and still do, that such a series of attacks would make the American response just that much more violent and unrelenting. You can’t stop the US war machine via terrorism, all you can do is rile it up. A few thousand civilian deaths every month, and you’ll see a US response unlike anything we’ve ever seen, no matter who is in the White House when it happens.
Agree. Iran’s game is to fund proxy wars and incidents outside of their borders, with the intent to destroy Israel. While they do have a beef with the US for supporting Israel, we are too far and too big and too reactive to think about doing something big over here. That’s not to suggest they aren’t/wont be involved somehow (financially) with any hijinx, but I suspect they are more focused on doing shit to Israel.
I agree 100% and I would like the world to believe this as well. Terrorism could take over a world easier than armies if we caved into it.
It might make more sense for Iran to attack the US via cyber than physical attacks (9/11).
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s 2023 Annual Threat Assessment states that Iran remains a major cyber threat: “Iran’s growing expertise and willingness to conduct aggressive cyber operations make it a major threat to the security of U.S. and allied networks and data. Iran’s opportunistic approach to cyber attacks makes critical infrastructure owners in the United States susceptible to being targeted…”
Iran Cyber Threat Overview and Advisories | CISA
Why not attack the electrical grid(s) and/or water supplies as opposed to destroying buildings? It seems more harmful to say, “We can turn your water off and on anytime we feel like it, and there’s nothing you can do about it” than, “BAM! We blew up another of your buildings!”
Which would also impair our ability to strike back. I’m sure the government has redundant systems, but they might be too busy keeping the east coast from collapsing into anarchy to mount an overseas offensive.
I agree. Pearl Harbor and 9/11 showed the danger of angering and antagonizing the American populace, and 1000 terrorist attacks, or one attack involving 1000 terrorists that could be linked to Iran would produce similar if not worse results.
Because smart electrical and water departments don’t connect their control stuff to the Internet in the first place. There’s a whole Department of Homeland Security section dedicated to “protected critical infrastructure” best practices, and the management of related information about said critical infrastructure.
That’s not to say there aren’t penny-ante utilities out there who don’t do that kind of thing (look at the recent Unitronics equipment hacks), but as I understand it, most do.
They switched to manual control after a hack.
Oh, I know.
What I’m getting at is that utilities should be entirely segregating their control networks from their general purpose networks and the internet. That’s the best practice in the industry, and what DHS suggests as well.
Clearly these affected utilities aren’t doing that, but it doesn’t mean it’s a good thing or a best practice, or something that savvy utilities are doing.
I’m getting the feeling that conspiracy theories are sitting around, shaking their heads, and thinking “Conspiracy theory? How is this a conspiracy theory?” A prediction of a possible event by a foreign power in the future; that’s not a conspiracy theory. Remember the good old days when a conspiracy theory was about, you know, a conspiracy? The sixties were the greatest. We got people saying that both the U.S. and the Rooskies plotted together to fake a moon leading. That was a conspiracy theory. Kids today. Worse than autotune. Ya know what I mean?
Then you’d have to run fiber between your water plants and the office.
I’m not sure the sixties were really the heyday of moon landing conspiracies - unless you’re talking about the 95% of the sixties when it was a conspiracy theory that we had landed on the moon.
I think nutjob “kill them all and fuck the consequences” extremists usually don’t have the organization and resources to pull off something really big; while state actors who have the resources are usually not so fanatical that they don’t care about the earthly consequences. Al Qaeda kind of hit a sweet spot of having both the will and the resources to do it, and only then because we weren’t paying attention.
In the first couple of years after 9/11/01 the FAA would publish (at DHS’s behest) restrictions over things like the Super Bowl or the World Series. With interceptors at the ready.
But not for anything less nationally significant. And by nationally significant I mean anything that half the country would be watching on live TV. The direct goal was to prevent the national audience from seeing an atrocity, not to protect the live attendees. The indirect goal was that by denying bad actors the possibility of the national audience, they protected the live attendees.
And that habit quit a couple/few years after 9/11/01.
I was in IT for emergency management at the time and special events like Super Bowls and such was our bread and butter.
There was a LOT of security for many miles around and above when then-President Bush threw out the first pitch at the first game of the World Series roughly 6 weeks after the 9/11 attack. There was also an insane level of utterly hidden disaster response teams at the ready. And not just due to the presence of the President; the same was true for the later games he did not attend. Same at the Super Bowl. NEST teams, decon teams scaled for mass casualty nerve agent attacks, etc. You name a bad thing, if there was a federal force to manage it, they were there. As were the state and local folks. In depth. A vast amount of taxpayer dollars were incinerated very quickly during those weeks.
I left that business a decade later around 2011, but by then there was no real counter-terrorism physical presence at these events. Just counter-crime and the heavy fire / ambulance headcount you need to deal with 50K or 100K people all in one place at one time.
I don’t think SCADA networks for controlling pump stations and treatment plants are high-bandwith. You might be able to get away with some other kind of cheaper, but still dedicated circuits.
But how many treatment plants do you have in most places? I can’t imagine your average piddly MUD has more than one purification plant, one treatment plant, and maybe a small handful of pump stations. That’s not a huge network, and if you locate your control center at one of the plants, you don’t have that much to provision.
True, but the limit on twisted pair is what, a kilometer? You also are dependent upon the integrity of that devoted cable, whatever media it is. If I had enough money in that situation, I’d go for a microwave link.
The best thing is to not network it at all. They’ve been run that way for quite some time.