Day two of the simulation arrives, and Corman lays out the new actuality: Quite a few water mains throughout the nation have damaged. The person-made drought has unfold to hospitals, knowledge facilities, refrigeration, and manufacturing.
Then Corman throws one other curveball: He performs a prerecorded video assertion from a fictional army official interesting to the insurance coverage firms’ assist in responding to the geopolitical menace posed by China, the first time that nation’s identify has been spoken in the sport to date. “I am most involved about our potential to defend our army mobility, a key aspect of nationwide safety,” the official tells them.
Corman arms out the day-two task: As the disruption spirals outward, how will they prioritize now which of the water utilities deserve their assets? The “biggest-customers-first” or “first-come, first-serve” solutions from the prior spherical, only a few minutes earlier, now appear hopelessly naive. Will they focus on restoring water in locations the place they will save the most lives, akin to hospital-dense cities? Or will they search to reduce financial hurt? Or heed the army’s request to focus on nationwide safety, primarily prioritizing the army’s response to China’s potential invasion of Taiwan?
Fortuitously, nobody in the room is a monster. After quarter-hour of breakout conversations, the groups round the room render the identical verdict, that their first precedence shall be to save human lives—although none spells out how they’ll make the limitless inconceivable choices that observe from that reply.
Just one particular person, in spite of everything six groups have given that very same reply, speaks up to increase an uncomfortable level. Prioritizing hurt to individuals above all else might not be an possibility. “The simple reply is public security, human life,” he says. “The tougher one is if you do have regulators or somebody calling, shareholders asking questions.”
“If Treasury is calling and asking numbers, and we’re saying we’re centered on human life, I don’t know if that’s the precise speak observe,” he goes on, utilizing a gross sales time period for a telephone script of speaking factors for shopper conversations. Or, he provides, if an official is telling the firm it wants to focus on telecommunications or “twin use” infrastructure—which means issues that may have army significance—that may turn out to be “precedence primary,” he says.
In different phrases, taking the most direct motion to defend individuals from hurt in the midst of a catastrophic cyberattack would possibly require breaking contracts, flouting the army’s calls for, or instantly contradicting a bigger US authorities technique in the early days of an unfolding conflict.
“We didn’t agree on that as a desk,” he says. “There’s not going to be a consensus.”
At this level, abruptly and mercifully, Corman ends the sport to begin a lessons-learned session. Throughout this spherical, he’s put up a slide that represents a few of the infrastructure disrupted by the second-order results of the hackers’ cyberattacks. Subsequent to every is a protracted line of multicolored greenback indicators and descriptions of individuals, representing monetary loss and human casualties.
There’s no level in counting these as in the event that they’re some form of rating or demerit, Corman assures me once I ask afterward. They’re much less a quantified measure of losses than a qualitative assurance that issues have gotten very dangerous. He’s gotten his level throughout: If this sport has any winners, they’re not in the room.
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