A WIRED journalist observed a private role-playing "war game" held in a Times Square office tower, in which a former US cybersecurity official, Joshua Corman, walked dozens of insurance executives through a simulated Chinese cyberattack on American water utilities set in July 2027. The exercise matters because it dramatises a scenario that security experts increasingly regard as plausible, exposing how a strike on critical infrastructure could cascade into a nationwide crisis and force wrenching decisions about who gets help first.

In the simulation, hackers disrupt 5,000 water utilities, and within 24 in-game hours the knock-on effects mount: failing refrigeration and drug manufacturing cause insulin shortages, data-centre cooling fails, and 2,000 hospitals lose water amid a summer heatwave, with some physical damage such as burst mains. Participants, cast as insurers, had to ration incident responders and money and weigh whether to invoke "act of war" clauses that would let them pay nothing. The game echoes real concerns about Volt Typhoon, a Chinese military-linked hacking group revealed in May 2023 by Microsoft, the NSA and CISA, which was found "pre-positioning" inside US infrastructure — from ports to a small Massachusetts water department — apparently to sow chaos and weaken US resolve, possibly ahead of an invasion of Taiwan.