The Threat to America’s Electrical Grid Is Much Bigger Than You Can Possibly Imagine
BY
Greetings from the front. The cyberwar continues. Our operatives continue to hit infrastructure targets around the globe. In June alone we conducted 44 ops, hitting targets in 26 U.S. states and six countries total. Each operation impacted as many 15,000 people and lasted for up to four and half hours. Of course that’s just our unclassified operations; the actual number of power outages our operatives have caused is 10 times that number.
As we continue to wreak havoc on your electric infrastructure, your policymakers and cyberwar hawks are rattling sabers, worried about online attacks from nation-states, completely ignoring the threats that successfully target your power grid every day. TheWashington Post, Forbes, USA Today, and even the esteemed Ted Koppel talk about “cybergeddon,” trillion-dollar risks, and when — not if — a massive cyberattack on the U.S. electric power grid will occur. Even President Obama is worried. In the meantime, we quietly go about our work, disrupting power generation and transmission across the globe.
To date there has been exactly one, just one, power outage that can be attributed to some sort of cyberattack by a nation-state. Last December, someone (many people say directed by the Russian government, but there really isn’t enough evidence to support that accusation) hit up to six different power companies in Ukraine with a coordinated malware and DDoS attack. This definitely wasn’t a random lone hacker in a basement; this took months of planning and coordinated effort. It sounds scary but the outagesonly lasted a few hours and affected around 80,000 residences. We have caused far bigger and longer outages all by ourselves.
We are everywhere, and yet almost impossible to find. There are other events that have impacted critical infrastructure: a water pump failure in Illinois, power outages in Brazil, a pipeline explosion in Turkey, a cyberattack on a dam in New York; even a blast furnace in a German steel plant was supposedly put into an uncontrolled shutdownfrom a cyberattack. In each case, the initial cause for the failure was blamed on cyberattacks — but in each case, once the evidence was actually examined, hackers were nowhere to be found. Still, that lack of evidence hasn’t stopped the cyberwar hawks from pointing to these analog events as examples of the coming digital doom.
When that doesn’t work, the threatmongers and profiteers point to previous widespread blackouts, known as “black swan” events because of their rarity, such as the Northeast blackout of 2003 or the Southwest blackout of 2011. In both cases, a string of unlikely events occurred, including human error, before the lights went out. In both cases, most of the power was restored in just a few hours. There were no riots, no financial meltdowns, and democracy continued unabated.
Then there’s what we affectionately call the “nine substation problem.” After a bunch of armed assailants opened fire on a substation outside of Metcalf, California, in 2013, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) conducted a study of the national power grid and found that if just nine substations were attacked in a similar manner as the one in Metcalf, the entire United States would be without power for over 18 months. Are you freaked out yet?
