The 176th Cyber Protection Team is a group trained to identify and battle active cyber threats.
Wisconsin National Guard’s First Sergeant and Intelligence Analyst Michael David spoke with WTMJ’s Vince Vitrano about what cyber attackers are looking to accomplish.
“There’s a lot of threats. Fortunately, a lot of them are low skilled, David said. “Obviously high-skilled actors do come after critical infrastructure but they’re mostly looking for entail to take back to their countries.”
But David said those threats are what keeps the 176th Cyber Security Team on their toes, especially when it comes to critical infrastructure.
“The critical infrastructure that we mostly look at are lifeline supports because if those go down it’s a really bad day for us,” David said. “So we’re talking about water treatment, electricity and stuff like that.”
David said whether or not cyber hackers are able to spontaneously attack important infrastructure from anywhere around the world depends on a couple of factors.
“It depends,” David said. “Some of the systems are legacy systems and have been up and running for 20-30 years and were never designed with the current threat environment in mind.”
However, this shouldn’t leave you shaking in your boots. David said he doesn’t lose sleep worrying about cyber threats because there are “securities in place” to prevent a catastrophic widespread event.
“A lot of stuff doesn’t really worry me that bad,” David said. “We have a lot of securities in place. Wisconsin has the home rule laws, so each of our systems aren’t as interconnected; especially with like voting, water systems. While it might really be easy to contaminate one town’s water, it is not going to go widespread across the state as easily as maybe in the movies…We have the resources to help.”
