Fort Bragg in North Carolina says the Army base had a “blackout” for more than 12 hours overnight Wednesday as part of a cyber-attack military exercise that came as a complete surprise to its tens of thousands of residents.
The fort, which the Army says is the world’s largest military base, says it cut off the electricity “to identify shortcomings in our infrastructure, operations and security.”
“Fort Bragg has to train for any possible threats to the installation in order to remain mission capable,” said a post on Fort Bragg’s Facebook page just after 11 a.m.
“This exercise was not announced in order to replicate likely real-world reactions by everyone directly associated with the installation. In today’s world, cyber-attacks are very likely. This exercise is exactly what we needed to do to identify our vulnerabilities and work to improve our security and deployment posture.”
The first of the power outages went into effect around 10 p.m. Wednesday. Power began returning to some parts of the base around 11 a.m. Thursday. Fort Bragg officials said it could be 4 p.m. before base operations would return to normal Thursday.
www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article229662514.html