U.S. Cyber Command: No question an attack will bring the grid down

Adm. Mike Rogers, Cyber Command chief and director of the National Security Agency, recently told a crowd gathered for a security conference in San Francisco that the country should brace for devastating cyberattacks on vulnerable infrastructure.

“It is only a matter of the ‘when,’ not the ‘if’ we’re going to see a nation-state, group or actor engage in destructive behavior against critical infrastructure in the United States,” Rogers said.

Rogers pointed to a recent “very well-crafted attack” on the Ukrainian electrical grid that left more than 200,000 homes and businesses without power as an example of the kind of threat facing the U.S. grid.

According to a State Department investigation into the Ukrainian attack: “The outage was the result of a cyber attack against the networks of the local power company, marking the first blackout to be caused by malicious software.”

But, Rogers warned: ” This isn’t the last we’re going to see this, and that worries me.”

The CYBERCOM chief also noted that terrorists could also use hacking skills to manipulate data crucial to keeping the nation’s infrastructure running smoothly.

“What happens when that same activity is used to manipulate data, to manipulate software or products, and suddenly we can no longer trust the data we’re visually seeing?” he asked.

The short answer is chaos.

And causing a nationwide blackout in the U.S. wouldn’t be as difficult for hackers as you may think.

A recent report in The Wall Street Journal noted, “The U.S. could suffer a coast-to-coast blackout if saboteurs knocked out just nine of the country’s 55,000 electric transmission substations on a scorching summer day, according to a previously unreported federal analysis.”

Unfortunately, for all the worrying officials like Rogers are doing about a cyberattack on the nation’s power grid, there’s little the government can do to stop it.

Replacing vulnerable energy infrastructure would take years and cost trillions of dollars. And even if new infrastructure and security protocols were put into place, it’s become pretty clear in recent years that the federal government isn’t very good at cybersecurity.

Thankfully, we’ve recently learned of a few private companies developing profitable strategies for protecting the power grid in ways that the government can’t. More on that here.

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