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The US Grid Attack Looming on the Horizon
A major cyberattack on the US electrical grid has long worried security experts. Such an attack wouldn’t be easy. But if an adversary pulled it off, it’d be lights out in more ways than one.
Case in point: Hackers, believed to be linked to the Chinese government, spent years exploiting vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure across the mainland United States and Guam to obtain access to their systems. In this hypothetical, first drafted in 2015 but updated in the years since, Lloyd’s estimates that a Trojan virus that manages to infect just 50 generators—removing 10 percent of the grid’s total power—can trigger this cascade effect and knock out power for most of the East Coast, including New York City and Washington, DC. “Images of a dark New York City make front pages worldwide,” they write, “accompanied by photographs of citizens stuck underground for hours on stranded subway cars and in elevators in the summer heat.”
Or read this on Wired
