With everything happening in this country now, reading these chapters did not give me a warm and fuzzy feeling. It is not hard for me to imagine that the lines of code have already been written and put in place, only waiting the push of a key at the time of their choosing. When one considers just how many peoples and nations our so called leaders have pissed off or f*#ked over, the word 'their' could be legion against us...Turn out the lights, the parties over...

..Assante, despite the months of effort and millions of dollars in federal funds he’d spent developing the attack they were witnessing, somehow felt a kind of sympathy for the machine as it was being torn apart from within. “You find yourself rooting for it, like the little engine that could,” Assante remembered. “I was thinking, ‘You can make it!’ ”

The machine did not make it. After a third hit, it released a larger cloud of gray smoke. “That prime mover is toast,” an engineer standing next to Assante said. After a fourth blow, a plume of black smoke rose from the machine thirty feet into the air in a final death rattle.

The test director ended the experiment and disconnected the ruined generator from the grid one final time, leaving it deathly still. In the forensic analysis that followed, the lab’s researchers would find that the engine shaft had collided with the engine’s internal wall, leaving deep gouges in both and filling the inside of the machine with metal shavings. On the other side of the generator, its wiring and insulation had melted and burned. The machine was totaled.

In the wake of the demonstration, a silence fell over the visitor center. “It was a sober moment,” Assante remembers. The engineers had just proven without a doubt that hackers who attacked an electric utility could go beyond a temporary disruption of the victim’s operations: They could damage its most critical equipment beyond repair. “It was so vivid. You could imagine it happening to a machine in an actual plant, and it would be terrible,” Assante says. “The implication was that with just a few lines of code, you can create conditions that were physically going to be very damaging to the machines we rely on.”

But Assante also remembers feeling something weightier in the moments after the Aurora experiment. It was a sense that, like Robert Oppenheimer watching the first atomic bomb test at another U.S. national lab six decades earlier, he was witnessing the birth of something historic and immensely powerful.

“I had a very real pit in my stomach,” Assante says. “It was like a glimpse of the future.”
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2023/02/part-3-sandworm-new-era-of-cyberwar.html