Internet hackers were able to trigger a massive blackout in multiple cities outside the U.S., an official from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has revealed.
CIA senior analyst Tom Donahue recently told a conference of government officials, engineers and utility company security managers at the SANS Institute that the attacks apparently were part of an extortion scheme.
“We do not know who executed these attacks or why, but all involved intrusions through the Internet," Donahue explained, according to an account of his talk published in a SANS online newsletter.
The attackers, who may have had inside knowledge to help them, broke into computer systems and disrupted power equipment in several regions, Donahue said. In at least one case, they managed to cause a power outage affecting a number of cities.
SANS director of research Alan Paller warned several years ago that hackers were staging denial-of-service attacks against computer systems, followed by demands for money.
The potential vulnerability of power grids was exposed publicly last year, when CNN aired a video of a U.S. government simulation of a cyberattack on a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system of the sort that utilities use. In the demonstration, a power turbine was reduced to a smoking heap of metal. Here’s a PC World article with more details on the demonstration and its significance.
U.S. officials are taking steps to protect computers that manage power systems against such attacks. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission recently announced new mandatory standards for cyber security for U.S. utility companies.