There's Only One Thing Stopping Enemy Nations From Smashing America's Power Grid
The recent discovery "Chinese" hackers of probing America's electrical grid serves as a reminder of a potential cyber attack that could far surpass the destructive impact of Stuxnet, which is believed to have been released by the U.S. and Israel to attack Iranian industrial machinery.
Tom Simonite, of MIT Tech Review, recently confirmed that a devastating attack on the grid is a viable option:
“Nations have had the capability to make attacks that could have caused loss of life for many years,” Jason Healy, director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative of the Atlantic Council, told MIT.
A lack of diligence preparing America's critical infrastructure has made its grid especially vulnerable. A recent survey of the computers behind the machinery in utilities such as power plants, water treatment centers, traffic controls uncovered more than 500,000 potential targets.
Martin LaMonica, also of MIT Tech Review, reported that a recent poll of individuals involved in critical infrastructure showed that these problems are systemic:
Seventy percent of the nearly 700 respondents said they consider their SCADA systems to be at high or severe risk. One third of them suspect that they have been already been infiltrated.
Consequently, Washington-area think tanks are already envisioning the outcome of a U.S. without power. From Simonite:
Healy said that [Atlantic Council] researchers are trying to work out the trying to work out the economic effects of an extended power outage, with a view to sketching out guidelines for when a military response was justified.
Flickr/woodleywonderworksCausing an extended power outage doesn't take much, as both articles indicate. The main vulnerability is that U.S. utility control systems were never designed to protect against the risks of being connected to the Internet.
"A utility worker may set up a wireless access point at a transformer to connect to the company network," LaMonica writes, but without encryption "this sort of practice leaves this piece of grid infrastructure exposed, industry executives said."
By taking over the computers and network gear that connect to controllers of industrial systems, hackers could overload and blow all of the transformers on those systems at the same time.
Though experts say an attack from China is unlikely — due in large part to the country's vested interest in American innovation — "electronic WMDs" may have to be recognized alongside nukes, or bios, or chems.
"When you have a potential situation where you're dealing with human lives in terms of death and in some cases the same kind of destruction you see from other weapons of mass destruction, then that becomes a whole different ballgame," Dave Aitel, CEO of security firm Immunity, told BI. Healy told MIT the fact a power grid attack hasn't occurred indicates, much like in the case of other WMDs, that “deterrence is working at the highest level.” Unfortunately there are actors likeIran, Al Qaeda, and various lone wolves who can't be so easily deterred. Experts say that the main reason is lack of technology and funding, but those same experts say it's only a matter of time.