The US Grid Attack Looming on the Horizon

When the lights went out across the Iberian Peninsula in April, everything ground to a halt. Scores of people were trapped in Madrid’s underground metro system. Hospitals in Lisbon had to switch to emergency generators. Internet service as far away as Greenland and Morocco went down. While the cause remains unclear, the actual damage to the Iberian power grid—and the people it serves—was relatively minor. Less than 24 hours after the outage began, the region’s electricity operators managed to get the grid back online. Even if things could have been much worse, the outage was both an unnerving reminder of how suddenly things can go offline. For years, cybersecurity professionals, watchdogs, and government agencies have warned that a malicious cyberattack on the US power grid could be devastating. With ample evidence that state-sponsored hacking groups are eyeing the decentralized and deeply vulnerable power grid, the risk is more acute than ever. Case in point: Hackers, believed to ... Read full article.