’American Blackout’: Four Major Real-Life Threats to the Electric Grid

[cali]

A catastrophic, prolonged failure of the electrical grid—the sort of event whose effects are depicted in National Geographic Channel’s upcoming American Blackout, which premieres Sunday—may seem like just apocalyptic science fiction to some viewers. Unfortunately, though, the possibility of such a breakdown is all too real. (See related interactive: “Survive the Blackout.”)

Government and utility industry officials are so concerned, in fact, that in November, they will stage a massive emergency drill, called GridEx II, that will involve thousands of utility workers, business executives, National Guard officers, FBI antiterrorism experts and government officials from the U.S., Canada and Mexico. They’ll practice responding to a simulated failure of large parts of the electrical system across North America. (See related quiz: “What You Don’t Know About Electricity.”)

The scenario envisioned by GridEx II is a particularly scary one, in which terrorists or an enemy country stages a combination of cyber attacks and physical attacks that destroy or render inoperable crucial power facilities and take down large sections of the grid. As a May 2013 Congressional report noted, sophisticated cyber saboteurs may already be probing our vulnerability to a massive blackout. U.S. utility companies already come under frequent attack from Internet hackers who continually try to infect utilities’ computer networks with malware and search for security flaws. One company alone told congressional investigators that it was hit with an astonishing 10,000 attacks in a typical month.

If hackers managed to penetrate utility companies’ electronic defenses, they might be able to give instructions to key pieces of equipment that would cause them to fail. In a 2006 study, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory demonstrated that an attacker could instruct an electrical generator’s turbine to spin wildly out of control until smoke began pouring out, as this video illustrates. Since then, we’ve seen a real-life example of how such vandalism easily could be ratcheted up to a massive scale. In 2010, a piece of malware called Stuxnet destroyed as many as 1,000 centrifuges in an Iranian nuclear fuel-processing plant, in an attack that some suspect was launched by U.S. and/or Israeli clandestine agencies.

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http://energyblog.nationalgeographic.com/2013/10/25/american-blackout-four-major-real-life-threats-to-the-electric-grid/

[oldhippie]

1. Well, did anyone watch this? Any comments?

I watched the first hour, then discovered it was going to go for four hours. Way beyond my TV/movie attention span, so switched to football.

The first hour was interesting, seemed fairly realistic to me, but the use of the cell phone documentary meme kinda turned me off, not sure why.

[oldhippie]

2. So, no one else watched this? Or .....

... just not worth commenting on?

[Ranchemp.]

3. Did watch it,

the implications were pretty hair raising.
It was only 2 hours long and then started again.

[badtoworse]

4. I did not need to watch it, but I will say that the threat cannot be overstated

I've been working in the electric power business for 30 years and I'm well aware of the nature and extent of the threat, as well as the steps being taken to minimize the risk. Cybersecurity for critical infrastructure is a HUGE issue that is being taken very seriously by regulators and industry stakeholders alike.