Fox Business: Washington Moves to Thwart U.S. Power Grid Attacks
With the hacks into the Ukraine power grid, and the latest cyberattack on Israel’s Electric Authority, attention has returned anew to the vulnerabilities of the U.S. power grid, a problem that victims of Hurricane Sandy and the recent blizzard can attest to given wide scale power outages.
Though black swan weaknesses exist, Washington is moving to fix the problem. Confounding the solution is the fact that an estimated 90% of the 3,200 U.S. utilities are in private hands. Also, the rise of the “smart grid”—the grid’s computing and communications done over the Internet, as well as the Internet of Things–has poked open more entry points for miscreants to hack the grid’s computer systems. In fact, researchers have found holes in thousands of Internet-connected industrial control systems.
Even though James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, has said that “cyber Armageddon” is less likely than smaller attacks, those attacks could bedevil systems for years to come. It’s the ease of entry that’s concerning authorities. Cyberhackers could, for instance, break into a power grid system via a simple phishing email to a utility insider that’s loaded with malware, as is suspected in the Ukraine grid attack. The hackers can then seize control of certain parts of the system, all the while getting insights into industrial processes so as to conduct sabotage later on.
Though it reads like something out of a Tom Clancy novel, the attacks have occurred in the real world. The U.S. power grid routinely gets hit with hacks or physical attacks, with an estimated 331 from fiscal 2011 to 2014, and now occurring once every four days, according to the Dept. of Homeland Security. A major cyberattack on the U.S. electric grid could cause over $1 trillion in economic damage, estimates ThreatTrackSecurity.com. The Pentagon, too, has warned that, in a worst-case scenario, a massive attack on the nation’s power grid would take “many weeks” to fix, blanket the country in darkness, and push it into a recession.
The Government Accountability Office recently wrote of the weaknesses: “The cyber threat to critical infrastructure continues to grow and represents a serious national security challenge. Foreign malicious actors have directly attacked and extracted highly sensitive materials from the networks of government agencies and major critical infrastructure companies.”
