Glenn Reynolds: We aren't ready for the lights to go out:
The preppers aren't the only ones worried anymore about a debilitating attack on the U.S. power grid.
Could it be lights out for America?
That’s something that people are starting to worry about, and these worries aren’t coming solely from the usual crowd of survivalists and preppers.
Shut down the computers that run the power plants and distribution systems and you shut down America.
That’s looking more possible, lately.
One of those worrying is former ABC News anchor Ted Koppel, whose new book, Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath, looks at the danger of losing electrical power due to a cyberattack.
The picture Koppel paints isn’t a pretty one:
Cities, unpowered for weeks and months, could become largely uninhabitable.
But, says Koppel, nobody is thinking about this very clearly:
“It would be comforting to report that those agencies charged with responding to disaster are adequately prepared to deal with the consequences of a cyberattack on the grid.
They are not.”
...Well, that’s comforting, though not especially surprising:
If the government flubs its response to natural disasters like Katrina or Sandy, when storms are a regular occurrence, how likely is it to deal well with something that hasn’t happened to the United States before?
Nor is a cyber-attack on the power grid just a fantasy.
In fact, in Ukraine (which I fear is a laboratory for new warfare techniques the way Spain was in the 1930s),
it’s already happened.
As Wired magazine recently reported, someone —
most likely someone Russian — shut down Ukraine’s power grid with a hack attack that sounds like something out of a thriller movie:
...Somewhere in a region outside the city he knew that
thousands of residents had just lost their lights and heaters.”
The hackers didn’t just turn things off — they overwrote firmware on critical devices, making it impossible for operators to control them from control centers.
And, lest Americans think that our system is less vulnerable, the Ukrainian control systems were actually quite secure, separated from the regular Internet and protected by robust security systems.
American networks are, in some ways, more vulnerable..."
