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Major Cyber-Attack Will Happen Soon, Warns UK's Security Boss (theguardian.com)
Alex Hern, writing for The Guardian: A "category one" cyber-attack, the most serious tier possible, will happen "sometime in the next few years", a director of the National Cybersecurity Centre has warned. According to the agency, which reports to GCHQ and has responsibly for ensuring the UK's information security, a category one cybersecurity incident requires a national government response. Speaking at an event about the next decade of information security, Levy warned that "sometime in the next few years we're going to have our first category one cyber-incident." The only way to prevent such a breach, he said, was to change the way businesses and governments think about cybersecurity. Rather than obsessing about buying the right security products, Levy argued, organisations should instead focus on managing risk: understanding the data they hold, the value it has, and how much damage it could do if it was lost, for instance.
Rather than obsessing about buying the right security products, Levy argued, organisations should instead focus on managing risk: understanding the data they hold, the value it has, and how much damage it could do if it was lost, for instance.
He has a good point. When an all out attack does happen you won't be able to stop it. So before it does, make sure your backups work, make sure your restores work, put fences up to stop the spread of an attack, etc, etc.
In other words, assume the attack will succeed. Then what will you do?
Wrong thread Stuxnet, as stated in another thread, definitely happened, along with the Russian oil pipeline explosion in 1982. Those are definitely category one's. So yeah I'm with you, there's more to worry about than just Amazon going down for a couple of days. Still, I'd anticipate the attack vectors to be something other than municipal systems, depending on the motivation of the actor.