Reply to post: Take down the power grid? Old News.

Take down the power grid? Old News.

Don't panic, but Russia might be able to kill the US power grid

From David Sanger's "Perfect Weapon."

As the lights went out in western Ukraine the day before Christmas Eve 2015, Andy Ozment had a queasy feeling.

The giant screens in the war room just down the hall from his office—in an unmarked Department of Homeland Security building a quick drive over the Potomac River from the White House—indicated that something more nefarious than a winter storm or a blown-up substation had triggered the sudden darkness across a remote corner of the embattled former Soviet republic. The event had all the markings of a sophisticated cyberattack, remote-controlled from someplace far from Ukraine. ...

The more data that flowed in about what was happening that winter day in Ukraine, the deeper Ozment’s stomach sank. “This was the kind of nightmare we’ve talked about and tried to head off for years,” he recalled later. It was a holiday week, a rare break from the daily string of crises, and Ozment had a few minutes to dwell on a chilling cell-phone video that his colleagues were passing around. Taken in the midst of the Ukraine attack by one of the operators at the beleaguered electricity provider, Kyivoblenergo, it captured the bewilderment and chaos among electric-grid operators as they frantically tried to regain control of their computer systems.

As the video showed, they were helpless. Nothing they clicked had any effect. It was as if their own keyboards and mice were disconnected, and paranormal powers had taken over their controls. Cursors began jumping across the screens at the master control center in Ukraine, driven by a hidden hand. By remote control, the attackers systematically disconnected circuits, deleted backup systems, and shut down substations. Neighborhood by neighborhood, the lights clicked off. “It was jaw-dropping for us,” said Ozment. “The exact scenario we were worried about wasn’t paranoia. It was playing out before our eyes.”

And the hackers had more in store. They had planted a cheap program—malware named “KillDisk”—to wipe out the systems that would otherwise allow the operators to regain control. Then the hackers delivered their finishing touch: they disconnected the backup electrical system in the control room, so that not only were the operators now helpless but they were sitting in darkness. All the Kyivoblenergo workers could do was sit there and curse.

For two decades—since before Ozment began his career in cyber defense—experts had warned that hackers might switch off a nation’s power grid, the first step in taking down an entire country. And for most of that time, everyone seemed certain that when the big strike came, it would take out the power from Boston to Washington, or San Francisco to Los Angeles. “For twenty years we were paranoid about it, but it had never happened,” Ozment recalled.

“Now,” he said, “it was happening.