The world should brace itself for more physically destructive hacks, two senior cybersecurity officials said Wednesday, warning that a more dangerous era of hacking was already upon us.
“That will be our future,” he told a crowd of officers, academics and industry experts gathered for a two-day symposium<\/a>in central London.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chichester was seconded by Air Force Lt. Gen. James K. McLaughlin, deputy commander at U.S. Cyber Command, who told attendees that infrastructure-wrecking attacks were being seen “right now in the environment.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Neither official went into specifics about what they’d seen or why they felt the threat was intensifying, although McLaughlin invoked a cyberattack in Ukraine that knocked out three separate power distribution companies last year. The Dec. 23 incident, believed to have been pulled off by a team of hackers using stolen passwords, left 225,000 people without electricity, according to a U.S. Department of Homeland Security bulletin<\/a>published two months later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n