When light In April, the Iberian went out to the peninsula, everything for a stop. People’s scores were stuck in Madrid’s underground metro system. Lisbon hospitals had to switch to the emergency generator. Remote distance as internet service Greenland And Morocco went down.
While the reason is not clear, the real loss to the Iberian power grid – and those who function it – were relatively modest. Less than 24 hours After the outage started, the power operators of the area succeeded in bringing the grid back online.
Even if things could have been very bad, the outage was an unnecessary reminder of how things suddenly could be offline.
Over the years, cyber security professionals, guards and government agencies have warned that a malicious cyber attack on the American power grid could be destructive. With enough evidence that the state-proposed hacking group is decentralized and depth weak power grids, the risk is more intense than before.
Case in case: Hackers, it is believed that the Chinese is associated with the government, spent for years Exploit weaknesses Important infrastructure across the mainland United States And Guam to achieve access to his system. Volt typhoon dubbed operations, this access could be used to close or disconnect parts of the American power grid – to throw millions of darkness. Attempts, fortunately, were interrupted and patches the weaknesses. Nevertheless, it is an unnecessary depiction of how weak the electric system is.
We know what such a hack can look like. In 2015, Ukraine experienced the world’s first massive cyber attack on an electric grid. A Russian military intelligence unit, known as a sandworm, cut various substations from the central grid and offered hundreds of thousands of people.
The attack on Ukraine was repaired quickly, but cyber safety experts have warned over the years that the next one could be more destructive.
Unlike Ukraine, there is not a single power grid in the US – it has three large interconnections, which are broken into a network of small regional systems, some of which are spread over Canada. Most of the east is on one grid, most of the west on the other, while Texas and Alaska run their own interrelations. Running these networks is a wild complex effort: thousands of utility operations, tens of thousand substations, and high-voltage transmission lines at a distance of hundreds of thousands of thousands.
Photograph: Michael Tesier
