Getting Serious (Un)-Resilience of Lifeline Critical Infrastructure

Josh Corman opens the I Am The Cavalry track at BSidesLV 2024 by looking back at the group's origins and the widening gap between dependence on connected technology and the ability to secure it. He argues that disruptions to lifeline sectors such as food, water, healthcare and energy are becoming larger and longer, and that accidents as well as adversaries can cause serious public harm. He points to hospital finances as an example, noting that cash-flow outages from ransomware and rural hospital closures can cut off timely care for whole communities.

The middle of the talk turns to the possibility of a destructive conflict. Corman reviews public US government testimony about the Volt Typhoon campaign, which he describes as pre-positioning inside critical infrastructure, and treats it as a planning scenario for a hybrid conflict. He explains how quickly a loss of water would shut down a hospital's core functions, and he previews the day's speakers covering food, water, hospitals and municipal power. He also outlines a one-year pilot that uses plain, creative communication to reach local operators and residents before 2027.

He closes by urging the audience to identify systemically important entities, prepare with tabletop exercises, and take simple resilience steps for households and towns within a short time frame. The practical takeaway is that the work is about keeping essential services running during a disruption, not only protecting data.