When it’s hot outside and you can cut the air with a knife, you appreciate every second you have in air conditioning. But there’s no air conditioning without electricity, or much of anything else for that matter. I’ve been writing for years about the vulnerability and sensitivity of our power grid. Here’s a sample of what I’ve been trying to get Americans focused on:
- U.S. Power Grid More Vulnerable Than Ukraine’s?
- What Happens if Hackers Take Down the Grid?
- America’s Grid is Vulnerable: Here’s How to Improve It
- Don’t Get Caught in the Dark: America’s Electric Grid is Vulnerable
And let’s not forget those Russian hackers. Federal regulators say the Russians have hacked into U.S. utilities across the country, and are still in control. The Wall Street Journal reports:
The Russian hackers, who worked for a shadowy state-sponsored group previously identified as Dragonfly or Energetic Bear, broke into supposedly secure, “air-gapped” or isolated networks owned by utilities with relative ease by first penetrating the networks of key vendors who had trusted relationships with the power companies, said officials at the Department of Homeland Security.
“They got to the point where they could have thrown switches” and disrupted power flows, said Jonathan Homer, chief of industrial-control-system analysis for DHS.
DHS has been warning utility executives with security clearances about the Russian group’s threat to critical infrastructure since 2014. But the briefing on Monday was the first time that DHS has given out information in an unclassified setting with as much detail. It continues to withhold the names of victims but now says there were hundreds of victims, not a few dozen as had been said previously.
It also said some companies still may not know they have been compromised, because the attacks used credentials of actual employees to get inside utility networks, potentially making the intrusions more difficult to detect.
Read more here.
