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Two Way Radios in a Cyber-Attack

Maybe it’s already happened, and we don’t know about it. Or maybe it’s about to happen, and we aren’t prepared. When terrorism strikes and communications are comprised, two way radios may become our savior.

Imagine that it is just past midnight and it is Any City, USA. Masked attackers climb down five different manholes. Their mission is to cut 10 fiber optic cables and cripple the city’s electronic infrastructure. By coordinating their objective with two way radios, the job is quickly done. Suddenly, you have a town that is severely isolated.

No way is this sort of attack out of the realm of possibility. If it does occur, the results of the attackers’ actions will point out a critical fault in this country’s infrastructure: the impact of dependence on centralization. Unlike two way radios, which depend on their own power source, a domino effect takes place in rapid fashion with wired services, such as the immediate loss of 911 service, land-line phones, Internet access, and burglar and fire alarms. ATMs go down, and critical city utilities can no longer be monitored.

Commerce in general will also take a major hit. If you don’t have cash, you may be out of luck, because there will be no credit card transactions. Employees in the service industry, dependent on communication, will be sent home. Pretty much the only communication taking place will be over two way radios.

In the scenario above, the area attacked would have become partitioned from the rest of the world. But what would be the attacker’s goals? Terrorism. Mayhem. Or maybe some disgruntled communications workers who wanted to get even? One thing is for certain… the burden of facilitating communications would fall solidly on two way radios and other related wireless devices.

The lesson to be learned for those of you who are responsible for emergency services is to understand that, in the event of a large-scale emergency like this, the primary communications that will still be available to you will be two way radios, and not much more. Even though cellular phones are wireless, they rely on a central switching computer to operate. So when the system does not respond, you’re out of luck. But police and fire authorities can still talk, thanks to two way radios.

Authorities can help their cause by using area ham operators—strategically located at community hospitals, for instance—to dispatch ambulances and doctors, make arrangements for vital supplies, and relay emergency communication to areas that have working phones. Without two way radios, none of this could happen.

A hospital’s local network failure is proof of the inadequacies of centralized services. Local engineering does not take into consideration what will happen when things stop working in the case of an emergency. Surprisingly, the vast majority of emergency service providers, which depend on institutional networks, have never gone through the type of loss as described in this article. Disconnection from the Internet catastrophically affects e-mail and any Web-based services, limiting communication to two way radios.

If there’s one point we wish to make here, it’s that city and corporate disaster planners should understand how important wireless communications will be when faced with a terrorist attack or other malicious act. Be prepared to fight back with two way radios and other dependable wireless devices.

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