Intel
officer warns U.S. of 'digital Pearl Harbor' Says Chinese have Trojan horse systems already inside America's
infrastructures by F. Michael Maloof, 7/19/15, WND
WASHINGTON – A former
U.S. intelligence officer who was involved in efforts to identify terrorists
prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the United States is warning China
already could have what amounts to Trojan horses embedded inside the software
running the nation’s critical infrastructures, according to report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.
Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, who
today is an intelligence analyst on media outlets including Fox News, told G2
in an exclusive interview that the Chinese already have been conducting
espionage on the nation’s critical infrastructures. Shaffer also is a senior
fellow at the New York-based-London Center for Policy Research.
“The Chinese already have started,” Shaffer asserted.
“Much of what used to be done to hack bulk power systems, SCADA systems, the
Internet – it’s already being done.”
SCADAs, or Supervisory Control and Data
Acquisition systems, are computer-based systems that monitor and control
industrial processes remotely, enabling the automatic functioning of the
nation’s critical infrastructures.
They monitor and regulate the national
electrical grid system, the flow of oil and natural gas, nuclear power
facilities, finance and banking systems, telecommunications, the pumping of
fuel, food and water delivery, rail and truck transportation and traffic
lights.
As an intelligence officer at the Defense
Intelligence Agency, Shaffer was involved in the “Able Danger” controversy.
There it was claimed the agency failed to properly evaluate intelligence on the
9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and two others.
Able Danger was a classified military planning
effort under the U.S. Special Operations Command and DIA to develop information
on transnational terrorism.
Shaffer said the Chinese, whom current U.S.
intelligence has implicated in the hacking of the critical databases of the
Office of Personnel Management, did so without detection, raising the prospect
that they also could sabotage such critical infrastructures as the national
grid, finance and banking system, telecommunications and others which depend on
Internet access.
The OPM hack which was only recently revealed
publicly had been under way for almost a year, Shaffer said. He said the
Chinese will use the information gleaned from the hacking of more than 21
million past, present and prospective federal workers and contractors, many
with national security clearances, for espionage purposes. He sees the Chinese
having plans for the data.
“I see them doing a concerted reconnaissance of
who can be available to penetrate us,” Shaffer said. “During the Cold War, the
Russians spent a lot of time figuring out ways to get moles who have been at
the White House or the Pentagon and places like that. Clearly, this information
could be used for that and it would be information I would use it for.
“I don’t think that the intent here is to use
the information except to use it to increase the Chinese [knowledge] of our
government’s activities plus trying to recruit people clandestinely,” he said.
While Shaffer wouldn’t rate the OPM hacking on
the level of a Pearl Harbor or 9/11 attack, he said the potential is there for
the Chinese with their hacking skills to launch a “digital Pearl Harbor” on
multiple critical infrastructures simultaneously.
He said the issue now is how the U.S. can
prevent anything from being activated.
http://www.wnd.com/2015/07/intel-officer-warns-u-s-of-digital-pearl-harbor/
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