Word: grid
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...national power grid anywhere in the world has been brought down by a cyberattack. And it's worth keeping in mind that most countries have much fewer defenses from cyberattacks than the U.S. "It's virtually impossible to bring down the entire North American grid," says Major General (Rtd) Dale Meyerrose, a cybersecurity expert who recently retired as chief information officer for the Director of National Intelligence. The electricity-distribution system is highly decentralized, and there's no central control system; at worst, cyberattackers may be able to damage sections of the grid...
...most critical power users - the military, hospitals, the banking system, phone networks, Google's server farms - have multiple contingencies for uninterrupted power supply and backup generation. In the event of a cyberattack on the grid, they would be able to operate for long periods - days, weeks and, in some cases, indefinitely - without much difficulty...
...power grid is far from perfect. On any given day, 500,000 Americans experience an outage, says Arshad Mansoor of the Electric Power Research Institute, which is funded by the utility industry. Why is this a good thing? Because it means the grid deals with breakdowns all the time, and the industry knows how to fix them. The grid has built-in redundancies and manual overrides that allow for restoration of supply. Mansoor is careful to point out that these are "not defenses against cyberattacks, but for dealing with the consequence of such attacks...
...point is that in most cases, damage done to the power supply can be undone. "In the banking system, if someone hacks the system and steals information about 500,000 credit cards, it's incredibly tough to undo that damage," says Mansoor. "But if a section of the power grid goes down, we start it up again...
...This is not to suggest that the power grid can't be hacked into. In 2007, CNN reported that researchers working for the Department of Energy had mounted an experimental cyberattack against a power generator and were able to get it to self-destruct. Details of the experiment were kept from the public at the request of the Department of Homeland Security...