The report, “Integrated Infrastructure: Cyber Resiliency in Society”, which was produced in a collaboration between Cambridge University and Lockheed Martin, models the societal, supply chain, and macroeconomic consequences of a coordinated cyberattack on the UK’s power distribution network, quantifying both the immediate and long-term impact on the UK’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) over a five year period.
The UK Critical Infrastructure Cyber Catastrophe Scenario describes a well-resourced and carefully developed attack on the electricity distribution network in the south and east of the UK and its impacts on UK Critical National Infrastructure (CNI). This is a regional power supply catastrophe that affects between 9 million and 13 million electricity customers depending on the scenario variant. Its knock-on effects include disruption to transportation, digital communications, and water services for 8 to 13 million people. The economic losses to sectors are in the range of £11.6 billion to £85.5 billion in the different variants of the scenario. The overall GDP impact of the attack (GDP@Risk) amounts to a loss of between £49 billion to £442 billion across the entire UK economy in the five years following the outage, when compared against baseline estimates for economic growth.
