In February of 2024 the FBI, the NSA and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency put out a joint advisory about a group of Chinese state hackers called Volt Typhoon. The agencies said the group had gotten into the networks that run American energy, water, transportation and communications — and had been sitting inside some of them for at least five years.
They weren't stealing anything. The advisory says what they were doing there in plain words.
"Pre-positioning themselves on IT networks for disruptive or destructive cyberattacks against U.S. critical infrastructure in the event of a major crisis or conflict with the United States."— CISA, NSA and FBI joint advisory, February 2024
They are in place and waiting. The attack isn't the part that still needs planning. Somebody just has to decide.
On a Sunday evening in December of 2022, somebody drove up to two power substations in Moore County, North Carolina and opened fire on them with a rifle.
The county declared a state of emergency and put a curfew on people who had no lights, no heat and no way to charge anything.
The FBI is still offering twenty-five thousand dollars for a name. Nobody has been arrested.
Those two substations were protected the way the ones near you are protected. A chain-link fence and a padlock.
Congress set up a commission to study what happens if a nuclear weapon is detonated high above the country instead of on it. The blast never reaches the ground. What reaches the ground is the electromagnetic pulse — one surge, across the whole continent, through every wire and every circuit at the same moment.
The commission reported back that this is one of a very small number of threats capable of holding the entire country at risk of catastrophic consequences. It said the pulse could black out the national grid for months or years, and take the phones, the water, the banks, the trucks and the food supply down with it.
It reported that more than one country has worked on weapons designed to do exactly this.
And it told Congress the grid has never been hardened against it. That is still true today.
None of this is a prediction. One of them already happened, one is happening, and one is sitting in somebody else's arsenal waiting on an order. Nothing in the system has changed because of any of it.
The night it goes
A grid attack does not go down the way a storm goes down. There is no crew three streets over. There is no estimate. The lights go out across whole states at the same time, and then there is nothing to tell you anything.
The refrigerator stops, and everything in it is gone by the second day. The furnace stops even if it burns gas, because the fan that moves the heat runs on electricity. If the water comes from a well, the well stops. If it comes from the city, the pressure holds for a while and then it doesn't.
And the only thing still working in the house is the phone in your hand.
It has about a day in it.
When it goes, this is what goes with it:
You can't call your daughter. She can't call you. There is no way to find out whether your son and his family got home, whether they have heat, whether anybody is hurt. Nobody can reach you and you can't tell anyone you're alright.
No news. The TV is dead, the internet is dead, and the neighbours know exactly as much as you do, which is nothing.
No 911. No flashlight, because the flashlight is the phone. No bank, no card, no clock, no map.
A dark room and a black screen, and no way of knowing how long it goes on.
And nobody is coming
The reason this is different from a storm is what has to happen to fix it.
The equipment that steps power down from the big transmission lines to the streets is called a large power transformer. They are not kept in a warehouse. Each one is built to order, and about eighty percent of them are built outside this country.
There are not enough line crews in the United States to rebuild a region all at once. In a hurricane, trucks drive in from five states away. In this, there is nowhere for them to drive in from, because the same thing happened there.
And the federal government's own advice to households has been the same for years. Ready.gov, which is FEMA's site, tells every American family to keep enough food, water and supplies to be completely self-sufficient for at least seventy-two hours.
That is the government putting in writing that for the first three days, nobody is coming. And seventy-two hours is the number they use for a storm.
What I keep in the drawer
I keep one of these in the kitchen.
It's a power bank with a solar panel built into the face of it. It holds a charge like any battery, and when the charge runs down you set it on a windowsill and the sun puts it back.
That's the whole reason it's the one I own. Everything else in a drawer is only as good as the last time somebody remembered to charge it. This one refills itself in daylight, so it can't be dead on the day the wall outlets are.
There's about two full phone charges in it. That is the difference between a black screen and telling your family you're alright.
Two LED flashlights on the back. So there's light in the room without spending the phone on it.
Four lights on the front show how much is left in it. You can see it's ready without plugging anything in.
More than one port. So it isn't only your phone that stays on. In a house with two people in it, that matters more than it sounds.
And it's built to be put in a drawer and forgotten about. Rugged shell, water-resistant, dustproof, shockproof. It'll still be sitting there working in ten years, which is the only test that matters for something bought for a day that hasn't come yet.
Better to have something you don't need
Than to need something you don't have.
That's all this is. It sits in a drawer and costs less than a tank of gas and a grocery run. If none of the three things above ever touches you, what you own is a phone charger that works on a windowsill and a light that never needs batteries.
If one of them does, it's the only thing in the house still working.
