The US Grid Attack Looming on the Horizon WIRED

pWhen the lights went out across the Iberian Peninsula in April everything ground to a halt Scores of people were trapped in Madridâs underground metro system Hospitals in Lisbon had to switch to emergency generators Internet service as far away as Greenland and Morocco went downppWhile the cause remains unclear the actual damage to the Iberian power gridâand the people it servesâwas relatively minor Less than 24 hours after the outage began the regionâs electricity operators managed to get the grid back onlineppEven if things could have been much worse the outage was both an unnerving reminder of how suddenly things can go offlineppFor 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 statesponsored hacking groups are eyeing the decentralized and deeply vulnerable power grid the risk is more acute than everppCase in point Hackers believed to be linked to the Chinese government spent years exploiting vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure across the mainland United States and Guam to obtain access to their systems The operations dubbed Volt Typhoon could have used this access to shut down or disconnect parts of the American power gridâthrowing millions into the dark The effort was luckily disrupted and the vulnerabilities patched Still it is an unnerving illustration of just how vulnerable the electric system truly isppWe know what such a hack could look like In 2015 Ukraine experienced the worldâs first largescale cyberattack on an electrical grid A Russian military intelligence unit known as Sandworm disconnected various substations from the central grid and knocked hundreds of thousands of people offlineppThe attack on Ukraine was repaired quickly but cybersecurity experts have been warning for years that the next one might be more devastatingppUnlike Ukraine America does not have a single power gridâit has three large interconnections broken down into a network of smaller regional systems some of which stretch into Canada Most of the East is on one grid most of the West is on another while Texas and Alaska run their own interconnections Keeping these networks running is a wildly complicated effort There are thousands of utility operations tens of thousands of substations and hundreds of thousands of miles of highvoltage transmission linesppTo some degree this decentralized network is an asset as it means there is no core vulnerability that risks knocking the entire country offline But the interconnections mean that a failure in one corner of the grid could cause a cascade that takes down the entire systemppIn 2018 researchers from Northwestern University ran largescale models gaming out what would happen if parts of the grid failed They found that generally the American power grid was resilient However they found that about 10 percent of power lines in the US were susceptible to the kind of failure that could trigger this domino effect under some conditions A 2022 study that looked at possible disruptions to the Texas grid also found that in some cases a relatively small disruption could cause a series of downstream outages ârapidly in successionâppThis means that even if malicious actors manage to take only a small number of nodes in the network offline it has the potential to do enormous downstream damageppInsurance underwriter Lloydâs of London has looked at the effects of such an outage In this hypothetical first drafted in 2015 but updated in the years since Lloydâs estimates that a Trojan virus that manages to infect just 50 generatorsâremoving 10 percent of the gridâs total powerâcan trigger this cascade effect and knock out power for most of the East Coast including New York City and Washington DC The Lloydâs report states that this is an âextremeâ but ânot unrealistic scenarioâppEastern InterconnectionOver 120 million people across 36 US states and parts of CanadappWestern Interconnection14 US states two Canadian provinces and a portion of Baja California in Mexico Approximately 80 million peopleppTexas Interconnection ERCOTMost of Texas operating largely independently from the other interconnections Over 26 million peopleppQuebec InterconnectionAround 85 million peopleppAlaska InterconnectionApproximately 730000 peopleppâImages of a dark New York City make front pages worldwideâ they write âaccompanied by photographs of citizens stuck underground for hours on stranded subway cars and in elevators in the summer heatâppThese rolling blackouts would stretch through 36 states over the course of a day throwing some 93 million people into the dark It could take up to three days for half of those people to get back onlineâwhile hardware damage and other problems could require up to three weeks to fixppAs the outages continue more difficulties arise The analysts warn that an information campaign running parallel to the cyberattack could prompt strikes protests or general unrestppIn 2016 then Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator Craig Fugate was summoned to Congress to testify on the possible impacts of a cyberattack on the US electric grid Water and wastewater systems are some of the first things to go down he noted âThere is not really a good way to manage that if those systems go offline for extensive periods of timeâ Fugate saidppHe explained that the emergency response will become a game of triage distributing enough power gas and generators to emergency services and utilities while also trying to keep consumerfacing supply chains operatingppâCan you get enough life support and infrastructure going to keep the major supply lines upâ Fugate continued âYou are not going to have everything You are not going to have what the normal consumption rates areâppLloydâs estimates that the total economic costs and losses could hit 1 trillionppDeepfake Scams Are Distorting Reality ItselfppA GPS Blackout Would Shut Down 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