Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization by John Robb

Author:John Robb [Robb, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781620458914
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
Published: 2008-03-31T21:00:00+00:00

Cascades of Failure

There are two ways to disrupt networks. The obvious way is to pick a high-value facility and damage it. Despite the media’s obsession with the supposed vulnerability of the United States’ nuclear power facilities, this is typically tough to do. Facilities like these are often heavily guarded. The costs of an attack would likely be prohibitive and the rates of success low. A February 2006 attack by al-Qaeda on a major oil-processing facility in Saudi Arabia demonstrates the perils of this approach: the attackers didn’t even get through the second layer of security despite considerable planning and triple car bombs. A more refined approach that yields better results is to use the dynamics of the network against itself, and this is exactly what we are seeing more and more.

The secret sauce of this approach is the cascade of failure. A cascade is similar to what you see when you line up a row of dominoes standing on their ends. If you hit the one at the front of the line, all the dominoes subsequently crash into one another and end up flat on the table. Infrastructure cascades operate in a similar fashion.

In general, cascade failures follow a simple process and can occur naturally because of random failures in complex systems. To demonstrate how this works, let’s use as an example the disruption of an electrical grid because of a lightning storm.

First, a lightning strike causes a break in a line. Second, the demand for power this broken line services is shed to other lines, many of which are already near their capacity limits. These other lines are unable to handle the additional load and fail (to prevent damage to the lines). These initial failures shed demand to the remaining network. More overloaded lines fail, and so on. The end result is an avalanche of successive failures and a system-wide blackout.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.