Review of Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath

Author: Ted Koppel
Rating: 4 Stars
Review By: Shana

An incisive look at the existential threat of a cyberattack on our power grid. This book is streamlined and eminently readable, well-sourced and clear eyed.  Koppel's far-ranging access and variety of interviewees paints a disturbing picture of our unpreparedness for a very real threat (though any student of psychology will be unsurprised at the lack of urgency - we humans are awful at prediction and planning for disaster unless we clearly see the disaster coming). 

Koppel has interviewed various federal officials, state and local entities, private sector participants, and a range of people who most would call "preppers". In the end he does not come away with a solution. The fact is that there is no way to make any cyber sphere entirely secure. But Koppel does manage to provide some advice, some comparable situations in history (at least moderately, as there has never been a time that an entire populace was so densely packed and so utterly unequipped to survive without electricity, especially considering electricity is new), and a spotlight on our glaring lack of a plan. If nothing else, it should be a wake-up call to (at the very least) start addressing areas crying out for preventative action, as well as sketching out what to do in a worse-case-scenario.