Critical Infrastructure & Cyber Warfare: Cause for Concern?

'Pandemic' preparedness meets the cyber world. What could possibly go wrong?

Mar 29, 2023

The WEF “Cyber Attack” Scenario: Another Crisis “Much Worse than Covid”, Paralysis of Power Supply, Communications, Transportation

WEF: "There will be another crisis. It will be more significant. It will be faster than what we’ve seen with COVID"

Global Research, February 22, 2023

Author’s Note and Update
The World Economic Forum (WEF) which represents the Western financial elites, played a key role in the launching of the March 11, 2020 corona lockdown, which was conducive to a Worldwide process of economic and social chaos. It also played a key role in the launching of the Covid-19 vaccine.
And now they are “promising” us a crisis which is “Much Worse than Covid”.
Over the last three years the deliberate triggering of chaos has become part of a broad and complex agenda: the war in Ukraine, the hike in energy prices, the triggering of bankruptcies, the collapse of economic activity, widespread poverty, famine and despair, not to mentioned continued pandemic hysteria.
In recent developments, Washington has been targeting countries which do not endorse the Washington Consensus including Russia’s allies and trading partners. The new normal in US Foreign Policy is to engineer either regime change and/or economic and social chaos.

Cyber-Attacks

In 2021, the WEF conducted a simulation of Cyber Attacks involving a scenario of Paralysis of the Power Supply, Communications, Transportation, The Internet.

Klaus Schwab intimated in no uncertain terms based on “a simulated scenario” that a cyber-attack: “could bring a complete halt to the power supply, transportation, hospital services, our society as a whole”.

What does Schwab have up his sleeve. A “Cyber Terrorist Attack” conducive to unprecedented disruptions? Is this something that we should take seriously?

A renewed fear campaign, a warning of an impending danger? In the words of Jeremy Jurgens, WEF Managing Director:

“I believe that there will be another crisis. It will be more significant. It will be faster than what we’ve seen with COVID. The impact will be greater, and as a result the economic and social implications will be even more significant.” (emphasis added)

The 2021 cyber polygon simulation scenario had an obvious “contradictory” geopolitical slant:

The event was chaired by Russia’s Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, numerous Russian financial institutions, media and communications entities had been invited by the WEF.

Forty-eight countries participated in the Event, there were 41 partners of which 10 were from the Russia and Kazakhstan: News Agency TASS, NTV, Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank and a leading global financial institution, the Mail.ru Group, Russia’s largest internet provider, MTS, Russia’s leading telecommunications group, the State Legal Department of the Omsk Region, Siberia. Powerful banking financial institutions from Kazakstan. Among others.

See also the assumptions of the Training Program, which are predicated on terrorist hackers.

Amply documented, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has been instrumental in endorsing US-NATO’s military agenda in regards to Ukraine.

Was this July 2021 Cyber Polygon event (which occurred 8 months prior to the Ukraine War) intent upon creating political divisions within the Russian Federation by establishing partnerships with a number of powerful Russian media, communications, banking and financial institutions, etc.

Not a single representative from the People’s Republic of China. Was the Cyber Polygon Simulation (July 2021) intended to foster confrontation between China and Russia?

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, February 22, 2023

***

Below is the text of my December 2021 article, minor edits.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) which represents the Western financial elites, played a key role in the launching of the March 11, 2020 lockdown, which was conducive to a Worldwide process of economic and social chaos.

The WEF is now pointing to: “A cyber-attack with COVID-like characteristics”, which promises to be far more devastating and chaotic than the Covid-19 pandemic.

The World Economic Forum’s “Concept 2021”. Cyber Polygon Scenario

The World Economic Forum (WEF) which co-sponsored Event 201, the table top simulation of the corona pandemic together with John Hopkins and the Gates Foundation in October 2019, has been involved in another strategic exercise entitled Concept 2021. The latter is described as an:

“international capacity building initiative aimed at raising the global cyber resilience”.

It is not a table top simulation comparable to Event 201.

Last year it was conducted at the height of the lockdown via video conferencing. This year, the 2021 Conference “discussed the “key risks of digitalization”.

Those participating in the Cyber Polygon Exercise (2020) included high tech companies including IBM, numerous banks and financial institutions, internet companies, cyber security agencies, corporate and government media, think tanks, law enforcement agencies including Interpol with representatives from 48 countries.

The exercise was an obvious means to secure reliable partners and develop strategic alliances. In this regard, there were numerous representatives from Russia and countries of the former Soviet Union, including major Russian banking interests, communications and media companies. All in all 42 partners. No corporate /governmental partners from China, participated in the simulation.

There was also a training program with 200 teams from 48 countries. Cyber Attack With Covid-like Characteristics

Simulation of A Cyber-Attack. Towards A Complete Halt to Power Supply, Communications, Transportation

Klaus Schwab, founder and Executive Director of the WEF and architect of the “Great Reset” describes the crisis scenario as follows:

“The frightening scenario of a comprehensive cyber attack could bring a complete halt to the power supply, transportation, hospital services, our society as a whole. The COVID-19 crisis would be seen in this respect as a small disturbance in comparison to a major cyberattack.” (emphasis added)

Jeremy Jurgens, WEF Managing Director:

The implications of these bold “predictions” which represent the interests of the financial establishment are far-reaching.

What they describe is a scenario of economic and social chaos involving the disruption of communications systems, the internet, financial and money transactions (including SWIFT), the power grid, global transportation, commodity trade, etc., as well as likely “geopolitical dislocations”.

The opening session (July 2021) of Cyber Polygon 2021 was conducted (video below) by the Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Mikhail Mishustin together with the Director General of the WEF Klaus Schwab.

According to Mikhail Mishustin, Prime Minister of the Russian Federation

“Addressing cyberthreats and securing our common digital future are among the priorities of every government and company. …”

Video. The Opening Session featuring the Prime Minister of the Russian Federation and Klaus Schwab (July 2021).

The WEF has suggested in no uncertain terms that another devastating Worldwide economic and social crisis is likely to occur in the wake of the so-called Covid-19 pandemic.

Video: Next Crisis Bigger Than Covid

Is this Scenario a Dress Rehearsal for a forthcoming cyber crisis?

The geopolitics of this exercise are complex. While Russia is routinely threatened by US-NATO, the Russian Federation is a partner of this WEF initiative, which is largely dominated by Wall Street and the Western financial establishment.

Why was China –which is an ally of Russia– excluded from the Cyber Polygon Exercise?

The Cyber Attack is categorized as a Terrorist Act. Ask yourself the question: Who has the capabilities of carrying out such an attack?

Russia’s financial and banking establishment were actively involved in the Cyber Scenario. Was the exercise intended to create divisions between China and Russia?

While one cannot speculate, the matter must nonetheless be addressed.

And who will be blamed if the Cyber Scenario goes live?

Engineered economic and social chaos. Is that not part of a US hegemonic project?

About the Author
Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research.
He has undertaken field research in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and the Pacific and has written extensively on the economies of developing countries with a focus on poverty and social inequality. He has also undertaken research in Health Economics (UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), UNFPA, CIDA, WHO, Government of Venezuela, John Hopkins International Journal of Health Services (1979, 1983)
He is the author of twelve books including The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003), America’s “War on Terrorism” (2005), The Globalization of War, America’s Long War against Humanity (2015).
He is a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His writings have been published in more than twenty languages. In 2014, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit of the Republic of Serbia for his writings on NATO’s war of aggression against Yugoslavia. He can be reached at crgeditor@yahoo.com

From “Event 201” to “Cyber Polygon”: The WEF’s Simulation of a Coming “Cyber Pandemic”

Last year, the World Economic Forum teamed up with the Russian government and global banks to run a high-profile cyberattack simulation that targeted the financial industry, an actual event that would pave the way for a “reset” of the global economy. The simulation, named Cyber Polygon, may have been more than a typical planning exercise and bears similarities to the WEF-sponsored pandemic simulation Event 201 that briefly preceded the COVID-19 crisis.

Why Are ‘Conspiracy Theorists’ Worried About an Impending Power Grid Failure?

On the eve of the World Economic Forum’s Cyber Polygon simulation of a cyberhack a number of independent journalists and their supporters are warning of a potential power grid failure. Is there reason to be concerned?

“The only way to stop the exponential propagation of a COVID-like cyber threat is to fully disconnect the millions of vulnerable devices from one another and from the internet.”

All These Cyber Attacks Might Be Live Drills for What is Coming Later This Summer: Cyber Polygon 2021

‘Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.’ — Frank Herbert (1920-1986), in ‘Dune’

Ending Anonymity: Why the WEF’s Partnership Against Cybercrime Threatens the Future of Privacy

With many focusing on tomorrow’s Cyber Polygon exercise, less attention has been paid to the World Economic Forum’s real ambitions in cybersecurity – to create a global organization aimed at gutting even the possibility of anonymity online. With the governments of the US, UK and Israel on board, along with some of the world’s most powerful corporations, it is important to pay attention to their endgame, not just the simulations.

Prepping for a cyber pandemic: Cyber Polygon 2021 to stage supply chain attack simulation

The SolarWinds hack served as a wake-up call to the supply chain attack vulnerabilities still present in public and private organizations, and it served as a warning that the next breach could be exponentially worse in spreading through any device connected to the internet.

Cyber Polygon

https://cyberpolygon.com/about/

from ‘about’ section - jw
Cyber Polygon is an international cybersecurity event aimed at increasing global cyber resilience.
The event combines:
online conference with the participation of senior officials from global organizations
technical training on cybersecurity for corporate teams
expert talks featuring leading experts in practical cybersecurity

Official Cyber Polygon Training Description (pdf)

Ransomware

Ransomware is a type of malware from cryptovirology that threatens to publish the victim's personal data or permanently block access to it unless a ransom is paid off. While some simple ransomware may lock the system without damaging any files, more advanced malware uses a technique called cryptoviral extortion. It encrypts the victim's files, making them inaccessible, and demands a ransom payment to decrypt them.^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4]^[5] In a properly implemented cryptoviral extortion attack, recovering the files without the decryption key is an intractable problem – and difficult to trace digital currencies such as paysafecard or Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are used for the ransoms, making tracing and prosecuting the perpetrators difficult.

Zero-day (computing)

A zero-day (also known as a 0-day) is a computer-software vulnerability previously unknown to those who should be interested in its mitigation, like the vendor of the target software.^[1] Until the vulnerability is mitigated, hackers can exploit it to adversely affect programs, data, additional computers or a network.^[2] An exploit taking advantage of a zero-day is called a zero-day exploit, or zero-day attack.

Denial-of-service attack

In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to a network. Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled.
In a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack), the incoming traffic flooding the victim originates from many different sources. More sophisticated strategies are required to mitigate this type of attack, as simply attempting to block a single source is insufficient because there are multiple sources.

Stuxnet

Stuxnet is a malicious computer worm first uncovered in 2010 and thought to have been in development since at least 2005. Stuxnet targets supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems and is believed to be responsible for causing substantial damage to the nuclear program of Iran. Although neither country has openly admitted responsibility, the worm is widely understood to be a cyberweapon built jointly by the United States and Israel in a collaborative effort known as Operation Olympic Games.^[3]^[4]^[5] The program, started during the Bush administration, was rapidly expanded within the first months of Barack Obama's presidency.