Jim Rickards: Protect Your Money As China, Iran, N. Korea & Russia Preparing For Financial Warfare…”preparing to inflict as much damage as possible to the power grid and other critical infrastructure”
SilverDoctors.com
August 21, 2018
Jim says bad actors are using Cyber Brigades to hack their way into critical US infrastructure, and he says to prepare for asymmetrical war. Here’s how…
by Jim Rickards via Daily Reckoning
There are many bad actors out there who are preparing to inflict as much damage as possible to the power grid and other critical infrastructure, including the stock market.
I would put Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and a few others at the top of the list. Russia and China at the top of the list but Iran certainly has good cyber-warfare capability.
They’re employing what they call Cyber Brigades that spend all their time basically hacking into the critical infrastructure systems I described above. It’s a good bet that all of these systems have already been penetrated.
No one can beat the U.S. in a conventional war right now. China, especially, is catching up, but it’s not ready at this time. That’s why they’re focusing on attacking America’s critical infrastructure vulnerabilities.
This is called an asymmetric response. They want to fight in the area where they can win or at least inflict enormous damage.
Look at all the crisis spots around the world. North Korea, the Persian Gulf, South China Sea, Syria. If any of them start to escalate, you’re going to get an asymmetric response function.
For example, if President Trump sends the Seventh Fleet into the South China Sea, China might unleash an attack of the U.S. power grid, creating chaos in the United States. Or it could launch an attack on the stock market or conduct other forms of financial warfare.
Financial warfare is not the warfare of the future — it is already here. It’s going to become a bigger threat as time goes on, too.
Financial warfare is actual warfare conducted through banking and capital markets channels. It is not mere economic policy as in the case of so-called currency wars, trade wars or embargoes.
When nations engage in financial warfare, individual investors can be collateral damage. If China tries to attack the U.S. by closing the New York Stock Exchange, for example, it will be tens of millions of Americans who will suffer an immediate loss of wealth as prices plunge and accounts are locked-down or frozen.
Financial warfare attacks vary in their degree of sophistication and impact. At the low end of the spectrum is a distributed denial of service, DDoS, attack. This is done by flooding a target server with an overwhelming volume of message traffic so that either the server shuts down or legitimate users cannot gain access. In such attacks, the target is not actually penetrated, but it is disabled by the message traffic jam.
The next level of sophistication is a cyberhack in which the target, say a bank account record file or a stock exchange order system, is actually penetrated. Once inside, the attacking cyberbrigade can either steal information, shut down the system or plant sleeper attack viruses that can be activated at a later date.
You have probably noticed that unexplained stock market outages and flash crashes have happened with increasing frequency.
Some of these events may be self-inflicted damage by the exchanges themselves in the course of software upgrades, but others are highly suspicious and the exact causes have never been disclosed by exchange officials.
But in 2010, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security located such an attack virus planted by Russian security services inside the Nasdaq stock market system.
The Rest…HERE
