Many Americans across the country woke up on Thursday morning without cell service — but there’s still no explanation for what caused the outage.

The most affected were AT&T customers with 50,000 outages officially reported at 7 a.m. EST, but some Verizon and T-Mobile customers were affected as well.

Now, Americans are left wondering whether or not it was a solar flare or a massive cyberattack — especially considering just yesterday there was a cyber attack on the cellular systems in Israel.

This was a small taste of what life would be like after such an attack, but a bigger attack could have devastating effects.

“One Second After” author William Forstchen has been warning about this for years.

“If you saw the number of attacks, incoming attacks on our infrastructure, on our military, it’s unrelenting,” Forstchen tells Glenn Beck. “This is just a foretaste of the future,” adding that we should be prepared for a cyber attack.

“Cyber attacks could include our water system, our electrical grid,” Glenn says, asking Forstchen how widespread this could be.

“It could be targeted to a specific or in a general offensive, like what I would call a first strike scenario,” Forstchen says. “For example, take where you are, suppose water all across the board was shut down for 48 hours because that’s all electronically controlled.”

“Would be very bad within 24 to 48 hours,” he adds.

“If you lose electricity, that’s the fundamental building block,” he continues. “Then everything goes. Water, food, medical, all of it.”

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Pennsylvania's largest news organization hit with cyberattack ahead of mayoral election; FBI notified

The Philadelphia Inquirer has notified the FBI after its operations were disrupted by a cyber "incident" just two days before primary elections in the City of Brotherly Love.

"We appreciate everyone’s patience and understanding as we work to fully restore systems and complete this investigation as soon as possible," Inquirer publisher Lisa Hughes said, as the outlet reported on its website.

"We will keep our employees and readers informed as we learn more," Hughes also said.

The "apparent cyberattack," as the outlet described it, left the Philadelphia Inquirer unable to print its regular Sunday paper. Though its online publication operations continued, those operations were "sometimes slower than normal."

Employees will not be permitted to enter the publication's offices at least through Tuesday as a result of the incident, the paper also said.

The Inquirer noted this seemingly major disruption would not affect its coverage of Tuesday's 2023 primary elections in Philadelphia. In a piece published Monday afternoon specifically addressing the Inquirer's election-night coverage, written by the same individual who covered the outlet's cyber incident, Jonathan Lai, no mention was made of the incident. A mayoral seat, city council races, row offices, and judicial seats are all in play.

The Inquirer's publisher, Lisa Hughes, provided no anticipated timeline for restoration, nor did she respond to the outlet's own questions posed to her, including who was behind the incident; what systems, if any, were breached; and whether anyone had been specifically targeted.

The paper hired security company Kroll to investigate the attack. Cynet, the company's contracted security vendor, first alerted the paper to suspicious activity on Thursday, the paper said. The paper's weekend crew was reportedly unable to access the publication's content management system Saturday morning.

"Depending on who’s got access, and what kind of access they have and what they do with it, you can go a lot of different ways," Runa Sandvik, a computer security expert and researcher who specializes in digital security for journalists, told the Inquirer.

"And now it’s 2023, so it’s not like we don’t know about these types of attacks, and it’s not like we don’t know how they happen," Sandvik also told the outlet, emphasizing the importance for news organizations in particular to "harden their defenses."

Multi-factor authentication, a best practice identified by Sandvik and other security experts, is reportedly not in place for many of the paper's key systems.

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Ukraine hit with another massive cyber attack; one GOP senator warns Russian missile strikes could follow

The Ukrainian government said it was hit with another critical cyber attack on Wednesday, this one taking down several government websites and banks in the Eastern European country.

What are the details?

The attack, called a mass distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS, reportedly began around 4 p.m. local time, according to a post by Mykhailo Fedorov, head of Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation, CNBC reported.

In a post on his Telegram, Fedorov reported that websites for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Cabinet of Ministers, and Verkhovna Rada, the country’s parliament, were among those affected by the attack.

The government websites were offline as of Wednesday morning as officials attempted to switch traffic to another provider in order to minimize damage.

CNBC noted that a DDoS attack is when a hacker floods a target's network or server with traffic so that others can't access it.

What's the background?

The sweeping cyber attack is the second in the course of a week. Though the source of the attack has not yet been confirmed, it comes as Russia becomes increasingly hostile toward its neighboring country, threatening a full-scale military invasion.

On Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin sent "peacekeeping" troops to Donetsk and Luhansk, two Russian-speaking regions in southeastern Ukraine, promoting global backlash. President Biden considered the brazen move the start of an invasion and responded by ordering sanctions against the country.

The United States attributed last week's attack — which affected Ukraine's Defense Ministry, army, and state banks — to Russian agents, though Russia denied any involvement.

What else?

Over the weekend, reports surfaced indicating that the U.S. had obtained intelligence that Russia planned to invade Ukraine in the coming days.

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said in a tweet Wednesday that massive cyber attacks on the Ukrainian government and the disruption of communications were part of Russia's plan.

He also warned that the cyber attacks would be "followed by targeted missile strikes against air defense sites [and] ammunition/weapons depots."

A number of key government websites in #Ukraine just went dark\n\n#Russia\u2019s plan calls for a massive cyber attack on the Ukrainian government & disruption of communications followed by targeted missile strikes against air defense sites & ammunition/weapons depots
— Marco Rubio (@Marco Rubio) 1645628254

It remains to be seen if and when the Russian military decides to carry out missile strikes.

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DOJ email accounts compromised in SolarWinds hack attributed to Russians

The Department of Justice on Wednesday disclosed that its computer systems were among those compromised by a massive cybersecurity breach of government networks that U.S. officials attribute to Russia.

According to the Associated Press, the DOJ said that 3% of its Microsoft Office 365 email accounts were potentially hacked. The DOJ does not believe that classified systems were breached but would not say to whom the email accounts belonged.

"On Dec. 24, 2020, the Department of Justice's Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) learned of previously unknown malicious activity linked to the global SolarWinds incident that has affected multiple federal agencies and technology contractors, among others. This activity involved access to the Department's Microsoft O365 email environment," the DOJ said in a statement.

"After learning of the malicious activity, the OCIO eliminated the identified method by which the actor was accessing the O365 email environment. At this point, the number of potentially accessed O365 mailboxes appears limited to around 3-percent and we have no indication that any classified systems were impacted," the statement continued.

"As part of the ongoing technical analysis, the Department has determined that the activity constitutes a major incident under the Federal Information Security Modernization Act, and is taking the steps consistent with that determination. The Department will continue to notify the appropriate federal agencies, Congress, and the public as warranted," the DOJ said.

On Tuesday, United States intelligence agencies formally accused the Russian government of orchestrating the cyberattack on software manufactured by IT company SolarWinds. The massive breach of government networks was discovered by the company last month and is estimated to have affected some 18,000 SolarWinds customers and an as yet unknown number of federal government agencies, including the DOJ, U.S. Treasury, and the Department of Commerce. Other agencies including the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration have also confirmed they were affected by the attack.

A joint statement from the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) blamed Russia for the attack. The Hill reported these agencies had set up a cyber unified coordination group in December to investigate the extent of the SolarWinds hack.

"This work indicates that an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor, likely Russian in origin, is responsible for most or all of the recently discovered, ongoing cyber compromises of both government and non-governmental networks," the agencies said.

What we should all be asking ourselves after today's mysterious cellular outage

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