The U.S. power grid and other utilities, including water and sewage, are being watched by cyber spies, most likely from China and Russia, who have penetrated the nation’s electronic grid. The hackers have placed malware on the grid’s system that, if activated, could have serious consequences, a former homeland security official told The Wall Street Journal.
Some experts believe the news is just Capitol Hill politics, while others say it’s not something to take lightly.
Ira Winkler, author of The Spies Among Us and president of the Internet Security Advisory Group in Maryland, has been warning of such access to the nation’s power grid for more than a decade.
Winkler, who writes about corporate espionage in his book, began his career at the National Security Agency. But his exploits in the private sector, testing security systems by breaking into banks and high-profile companies, caught the attention of many. He was inducted into the Information Systems Security Association Hall of Fame.
Penetrating Systems
“If you can send an e-mail, you can control the power grid,” Winkler said. “In the last year we saw a GAO report about how the Tennessee Valley Authority (a federally owned corporation) intermingled their systems, and there is a report by the CIA that some were able to extort lots of money by charging people through the Italian power grid.”
Winkler listed several ways the grid is vulnerable. “You have another case where a nuclear reactor shut itself down because a system on the business network of the company was unavailable, and when the business system was down the reactor shut itself down, and that shows there is a dependency on the business network to control the nuclear reactor in that case.”
Last year Winkler was hired by a power company to penetrate its system. Within a day of their attack, Winkler and…