It may have just happened for the first time that can be proven.
This article by Shane Harris in the Daily Beast cites numerous government and industry cyber-security experts, who warn that an electricity outage in western Ukraine that took place just before Christmas could have been caused by an intentional cyber-attack. If it was, this would be the first time such a cyber-attack on the electric grid caused an electricity outage, anywhere in the world, the article reports.
And to add to the concern, there is conjecture that the Russian government may have been behind the attack, or at least approving of it.
The attacks raise concerns about the vulnerability of the U.S. electric grid to a similar cyber-attack. As reported by the article:
The attack in Ukraine could be a bad omen for the U.S. power grid. Malicious software that was found on the networks of the [Ukrainian electric] company, Prykarpattyaoblenergo, was also used in a campaign targeting power facilities in the U.S. in 2014. It caused no damage but it set off alarms across the security and intelligence agencies.
At the time, the Homeland Security Department warned companies about the malware, known as BlackEnergy, which it said had been used in a hacking campaign that “comprised numerous industrial control systems environments…”
Industrial control systems are used to regulate the flow of electricity and to remotely control critical systems at power facilities. Security experts have warned for years that they could be commandeered via the Internet and give a hacker the ability to turn off electricity to whole cities.
Of course, the loss of electricity from the grid to nuclear power plants could begin a descent into chaos that ends in catastrophic radioactivity releases. The alternating current (AC) from the electric grid is the primary source of power to run safety and cooling systems at atomic reactors, as well as their adjacent high-level radioactive waste storage pools.
If the grid is lost, nuclear power plants do have back up emergency diesel generators (EDGs). However, these too could be cyber-hacked and rendered dysfunctional. In addition, the article mentions that cyber-attacks could lead to weeks or even months of blackout. Diesel fuel supplies to run EDGs at nuclear power plants are measured in days, not months.
A cyber-attack on the Ukrainian electric grid is especially troubling, considering that Ukraine has 15 operational atomic reactors.
And Caroline Baylon et al. at Chatham House in the U.K. have published a report, Cyber Security at Civil Nuclear Facilities: Understanding the Risks.
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