Electromagnetic Warfare and the Cybersecurity Threat

Society's 21st century existence is completely reliant on our modern-day electronics, our networks and the electrical backbone of our power grid. Over a decade ago in 2001, the Hollywood action movie Ocean's eleven introduced and depicted an ultra-modern, high-tech Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) device as an EM weapon. For the purposes of a criminal heist, a mobile van delivered an EMP attack on a massive scale to inject a damaging blackout on the casinos of the Las Vegas strip. In this paper, we attempt to describe and explore the possibilities of designing, fabricating and deploying a portable EMP device for destructive purposes. We were successful in fabricating an EMP prototype weapon while all the needed components for our device were acquired from electrical supply stores, hobby shops or easily over the internet with no restrictions. We effectively demonstrated how our prototype can destroy small scale electronic devices. Understanding the larger threat is a targeted and transportable high capacity EMP weapon, which has the ultimate power to terminate many sectors of our modern-day technology.