Imaginary Worlds - Beware of CyberCity

Episode Date: April 22, 2015

Ed Skoudis built a different kind of imaginary world. It's a three-dimensional model of a town that the military uses for cyber war games. Ed's team plays the role of the terrorists who keep trying to hijack a train or contaminate the water supply, while cyber warriors stationed at bases around the world try to stop them. But at some point, CyberCity became more than just a project for Ed. He fell in love with this town -- its simulated people and their Truman Show existence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. You are about to walk into sort of a mad scientist lab from the 1880s. Okay. Here we go. So where am I right now? This is the main laboratory. Oh my god, this is incredible.

I actually can't say where I was. It's a military secret. Although, I do love saying that it was a military secret. I can tell you that I was at a nondescript building in central New Jersey. It's the headquarters for the Sands Institute, which is run by Ed Skotis. I went there to check out this amazing project that they're working on. But more on that later, because the first thing that struck me, the thing that really surprised me when I got there, was Ed himself.

I mean, I was expecting to meet this no-nonsense military contractor. But he was like a fellow geek to the nth degree. He calls his office the main laboratory. There's a suit of armor next to a bookcase, and a model train ran along the molding of the ceiling. The furniture was all designed in a steampunk style. He had all this cool vintage technology. Phonograph.

It's not accurate to call it a Victrola, because a Victrola came in 1924. Radios with these crazy Edison bulbs on them. This is what radios looked like in 1924. And at one point he handed me a wooden box with a swastika on it. Nazis. I mean, I thought it was like a prop from an Indiana Jones movie, but oh my God. It's an Enigma machine.

There she is. Which is the communication device the Germans used in World War II, which Alan Turing famously decrypted. Turing is Ed's hero. It's a German keyboard. It's a B. So this is the main office. This is where I work.

But I mentioned to you my staff works here as well. And they actually work, well, in the secret room. Oh my God. I was about to say, I really hope that bookcase opens up. There you go. I really, really hope that bookcase opens up into a secret room. Here we have Lynn and we have Tom. The secret room behind the bookcase was a long, narrow office,

which was built into the eave of the roof. And he showed me the secret secret room inside the secret room. And I'm like, so in other words words it's a closet. But in that closet was a little door on the wall. So if you open this up, there's a littler door inside and if you open up this littler door... There was another little door in the shape of wooden eyes and those eyes lined up with a portrait of Albert Einstein in the main laboratory. You know where this is going, right? Yeah, I think I've seen Scooby-Doo.

Exactly. That was exactly what I told the builder. Scooby-Doo. It's like Scooby-Doo. And he's looking at me like I'm crazy. People don't think Ed is crazy. In fact, they take him very seriously. He built his reputation around a video game called Net Wars, where the player tries to thwart cyber attacks. And one day he was promoting Net Wars on a military base, and the base commander took him aside. And he said to us,

he said, we love your Net Wars stuff. This is really cool. We're going to use it, but you have a problem. Net Wars is all based on computers. He said, what we need is something that teaches our warriors that cyber action can have kinetic effect. And kinetic effect is what military personnel use for when things move or break and people could get hurt or killed. He said, figure out how to do that. So I'd started brainstorming. And remember, he's a tinkerer. He loves these sort of handcrafted encryption devices and toys and gadgets. I sent an email to my whole team and the subject of the email was crazy idea. And the email said, wouldn't it be nifty if we could build a miniature city, maybe make it six feet by eight feet, and cyber warriors would have

to hack into it or defend it against hacks. And we could have like a real power grid in there. We could have stuff that would move. There would be video cameras that would stream all the video. And I sent this to my team. And my team was not overwhelmed. One of the guys on the team said, hey, Ed, that's really out there. But I don't see how we could make it practical. I don't see how we could get funding for it. But you know who loved it? The Air Force. And the Air Force has been in the vanguard of fighting cyberterrorism for a long time. Certain people in the military, if you tell them that, hey, one of your folks was able to hack into a power grid and turn the lights back on, certain people in the military leadership would look at that and say,

you just showed me that my people could play a video game. That's not real. It's a video game. Whereas we could say, actually, it was a real power grid. Admittedly controlling the electrical flow to a city whose, you know, surface area is 48 square feet, but still. So they set out to build Cyber City. The city itself was built pretty cheaply. They just went to a hobby shop.

But the power grids that run this model, that run the lights and the little train that goes around the town, they had to be tiny duplicates of the kind of equipment that Amtrak or Con Edison would use. So we're modeling the stuff to help people get smarter about it at small scale. In the meantime, the military has been training cyber warriors. And these men and women can be stationed anywhere. They could be in Afghanistan or Kentucky. They only interact with Ed's team online or through webcams. The mission starts up with they don't know what they're going to have to do.

The operation order is presented to them. They read through it. They're given access to certain computer systems. And we say, go. Ed's team plays the role of the terrorists. In one scenario, they hijack a train and put radioactive material on it. The cyber warriors have to stop the train or derail it. And again, they are trying to take control of a real train. I mean, it's not a real train. It's a really adorable toy train. But it's still moving. And they don't know whether they've actually succeeded

until they see on their webcam that the train has finally stopped or been derailed. Or another mission is that the terrorists have taken over the computer system of the water company. And they've tricked the computer into thinking that the water has been contaminated. So the computer system of the water company. And they've tricked the computer into thinking that the water has been contaminated. So the computer automatically releases chemicals into the water to uncontaminate it, and that's how it gets contaminated.

So the idea is the cyber warrior, the operator, has to retake control of those computers. They effectively have to hack into the computers of a friendly utility company that is compromised by terrorists. At this point, you know, I'm upstairs at the main laboratory in the secret room. I hadn't seen the model itself. So Ed led me downstairs. Sadly, not through a bookcase. It was just through a door.

And I saw that Cyber City is actually encased in a room within a room. And we stayed in that outside room for a while because Ed wanted to show me how cyber warriors around the world see Cyber City through live streaming cams. Now everything in the model has a very specific purpose. Now the reservoir, the one that the terrorists are trying to contaminate, there's sort of a bed of LED lights underneath it. So it's blue for normal, yellow for contaminated. There's a thin blue glowing line that runs through the ground, and that's the natural gas pipeline, which is also like total terrorist bait. Even the school with the playground and the church are there as places

to protect. But as he was, you know, zooming in and out in the webcams, I realized that a lot of these details really don't serve a purpose in terms of the war games. They're there just to make people really care about this place. There's fire hydrants. There are mailboxes. And then let's go to the houses over in the residential quadrant. There's a dog. There's a rug that's airing out. There's a rocking chair on the porch. I told you it feels kind of like home, right?

I mean, I know intimately every little bit of the city. But one thing you won't find in this model, little plastic people. Some people don't get this. When I tell them about the fact that I don't want to have little people walking around the city, they're like, why not? Who cares? But for me, it somehow, it changes the whole feel of it. And then might take your mind off of the fact that you need to learn the technical skills so you can defend this. Now, you could also argue it underscores the thing that you're defending. I mean, we could have a woman pushing, you know, a baby cart in there. And you're trying to make sure that she gets electrical power. She gets potable water. She gets, you know, the stuff that she needs to live her life.

That said, it personalizes it a little bit too much for me to have that kind of representation in the city. So the 15,000 citizens who, quote, live in Cyber City are all digital. They actually just live on the server. What they are is their data. So in Cyber City, we have a bank and many of the people have bank accounts. We have a hospital. Most of the residents have birth records in the hospital. Some of them are getting various medical treatments. They have prescription medications.

All that stuff is in the hospital. We have social networking inside of Cyber City. We have something very like Facebook. We have something very much like Twitter. We have a newspaper in Cyber City. We call it the Cyber City Sentinel. And you do feel sort of an attachment to certain characters that we've created in the city. You know, the person who works at the utility company, right? He's just a guy who goes into work every morning. He doesn't actually exist, right? I get that. He doesn't have a name, though. He does have a name. Yeah. We've got names for all these different people. They talk with each other. So they are like Sims in SimCity in terms of they start to have a life of their own?

It does feel like that, yeah. Let's go to Turing International Airport, the website for that. So the flights arrive and they leave. Oh, is this regularly updating? Oh, yeah, regularly updating just like it was real. It is a little bit like the Truman Show. You almost feel bad for these people. They have no idea they're never leaving Cyberspace.

That's right. They don't even know they're in a city. It's not real. But there's a reason why their virtual lives are so detailed. Like real people, all of their data is interconnected. And that's the soft spot that the terrorists can exploit. So, for example, one of the characters is a doctor. And in one scenario, he goes across the street to the cafe, and he uses the Wi-Fi to get on his account, his hospital account.

Unfortunately, the coffee shop in Cyber City is a hotbed of terrorist activity. So terrorists go into the coffee shop, they hack into the doctor's laptops, and then will ride across their connections into the hospital and try to cause mayhem in the hospital. I mean, that's scary. I mean, I use Wi-Fi at coffee shops all the time. But this part, it's even more disturbing. We actually, for some of our hospital systems, we had to change the code in them to make them more secure than they would be in a regular hospital. Otherwise, it's just too trivial to hack.

Oy. But Ed's team too trivial to hack. Oy. But Ed's team still keeps their sense of humor. We have a mission that talks about zombies invading the city, and you have to take over the billboards and say, look, the zombies are gone, everything is safe. Do you really have a zombie one? We do. Like the military said, could you please make a zombie one?

No, we kind of did that for fun ourselves. This may be a little strange, but we'd like a zombie outbreak. Just in case, could you imagine, hey, we made some news. No, no, the military didn't ask for the zombie one. Because now the missions are oriented around terrorists doing horrible stuff. And that has a certain psychological drain over time. And it might be a little fun to just put some zombies in there. But let's go ahead and walk in the city.

Finally. Oh my God, this is so cool. So the model town is set on a platform in a room. The four walls are painted sky blue. And I kind of understand why Ed wanted me to experience Cyber City through these live streaming cameras. There's something slightly disillusioning when you see it up close. It's like when I lived in Los Angeles and I'd see a sitcom being filmed, where, you know, obviously I know the show isn't really filmed in New York,

but somehow seeing the sets just kind of takes away your suspension of disbelief. At the same time, the craftsmanship that you get to see up close becomes even more impressive. Like all the little exhaust pipes on top of the buildings. The streetlights really make it. And the little streetlights are going red, yellow, green. I particularly like the view of Cyber City at night. Oh my god, that's beautiful. And parked on one of the little side streets is a Back to the Future DeLorean,

which serves no purpose except that Ed just loves having it there. Do you want to do a power outage for us? Yeah. The detail is so amazing. The doors that go down to the Isn't that eerie? When the power just goes out It's just like when the power just goes out, right? Tom, can you start it up again?

And we're back He led me back to the computer To show me the front page of the Cyber City Sentinel Which had just been updated With breaking news There we go, Cyber City power restored after mysterious outage. These journalists in Cyber City are fast. I mean, within 15 seconds, they got an article already published with quotes and everything. Residents breathed a sigh of relief today as electrical power began to flow again in

Cyber City. Officials are mum about the true cause of the disruption, leading to numerous theories offered by town citizens. We show some pictures of the lights now back on in the city. So overall, doing all this, does this make you feel safer knowing that you're two steps ahead, or does this make you feel less safe knowing that there's an infinite amount of scenarios you have yet to dream of? It makes me realize that there is a lot of work needed to secure this infrastructure. So I guess that's a fancy way of saying it makes me realize that there is a lot of work needed to secure this infrastructure. So I guess that's a fancy way of saying it makes me feel less secure. That said, through this kind of simulation, we can underscore the need to improve its security.

That's the bottom line, is how do we defend this stuff? This stuff, meaning, like, everywhere we live. Especially where I live, New York City. I mean, I have to admit, I came in here a little skeptical. I mean, I'd seen pictures of Cyber City in news articles, and I thought it looked really cool, but I was like, this is really useful for the military? Now I hope it pays off. You know, after I got home, I remembered something that Ed said,

that some of their missions can take hours to complete and I emailed him and I said did you say hours? because you know if a terrorist puts a dirty bomb on a plane those cyber warriors don't have the luxury of several hours to stop them and he wrote back that's why they're practicing well that's it they're practicing. Well, that's it for this week's show.

Thanks for listening. Special thanks to Ed Miller, Ed Skotis, and his team for giving me a great tour. I do feel a certain attachment to this little place. That you keep trying to destroy over and over again. That is true. You can like the show on Facebook or leave a comment in iTunes, which is great. It helps you find the show. I posted pictures of Cyber City and a link to a very different version of the story, which aired on the show New Tech City, all at my website, imaginaryworldspodcast.org.