August 23, 2024
John Downing
The electric power grid is the backbone of America, generating and transmitting the energy to empower all sectors of our economy. Reliance on the electric grid is our fundamental need. Because of this, it has long been considered a logical target for a catastrophic cyberattack.
Power grid outages are inevitable, and the economic impacts can be significant. One of the most notable in the United States was the 2003 Northeast Blackout which left 50 million people without power for four days and caused economic losses between $4 billion and $10 billion. In 2015, a cyber attack took down parts of a power grid in Ukraine. In March 2019, a solar generation utility in the United States experienced communications outages when an attacker exploited known firewall vulnerabilities to cause unexpected device reboots. Most recent was the June 2020 cyberattack that disrupted Honda’s internal computer networks, forcing it to shut factories across the globe and leaving employees cut off from email or internal servers. The attack appears to have been carried out by software designed to attack the control systems for a wide variety of industrial facilities, including power plants.