At an exercise in Boston that imagined a cyber attack designed to disrupt an important election in a “swing state,” voting machines were not an issue. It’s election day in Nolandia, an imaginary, mid-sized U.S. city in a key “swing” state, and things are not going as planned – at least for government officials. A day that started with snarled traffic and a suspicious outage of the 9-1-1 emergency call center that has put the public and first responders on edge. Already, the city’s police force was taxed keeping tabs on protests tied to a meeting of the International Monetary Fund. By afternoon, the federal Emergency Alert System (EAS) was warning Nolandia residents of massive natural gas leaks in neighborhoods in the north and west part of the city, prompting officials to order evacuations of the affected areas. Later, bomb threats called in to local television stations shut down a bridge […]
