A carefully designed and executed fire sale attack can cripple down a nation within hours
Fire Sale Attack; a term and concept which first turned up in the 2007 movie named Live Free or Die Hard starring Bruce Willis. Nobody expected a Fire Sale Attack would swing into a reality someday, but in the present time, it is evident and a substantial threat to the world. Before running into the minutiae about the Fire Sale Attack, let’s recall the movie’s plot. In the flick, a group of cybercriminals were shown executing a coordinated cyberattack on a metropolis and the attack was shown taking in three stages.
In the early stage, the assailants were shown hacking into various servers and rattling all the public transport systems such as flights, railroads, subway systems and the traffic lights leading to a city-wide disorder. In the second stage, they were showing disabling the financial services and wiping out all the economic records of individuals, banks and businesses. In the last stage, the movie showed them taking out public utility systems such as telecommunications, gas lines, satellite systems and electricity.
In 2007, Fire Sale Attack was thought to be a mere product of fiction, but in 2010, it turned out to be the real thing when the Stuxnet Attack took place.
The Stuxnet Attack- In 2010, a Stuxnet worm was circulated via a USB in the Natanz uranium facility of Iran. The worm spread through the computers and destroyed numerous centrifuges of the facility as it forced the centrifuges to self-destruct. Furthermore, the malware attack was performed in such a style that it showed no warning to the controlling centre and the authorities failed to detect the attack until the equipment began the self-destruction process. The incident rocked the cyberworld, as it was the first known virus capable of bringing down hardware peripherals.
The attack during Ukrainian elections- Another notable attack similar to a Fire Sale Attack took place in 2015 during the elections in Ukraine. A trojan known as BlackEnergy trojan was applied to bring down three Prykarpattya Oblenergo energy distribution firms. During the elections, 30 substations went offline and over 2,30,000 residents were stuck without electricity for hours. The grid controls were manipulated in a manner that they couldn’t be administered efficiently even after two months of the attack.
In the years to come, a full-scale three-stage Fire Sale Attack could turn into a reality given the advancement in cyber technology.
