Malware threat proves U.S. power grid much more vulnerable than previously believed
by: JD Heyes
NaturalNews.com
Thursday, June 22, 2017
During a recent two-part series published by Bugout.news about how an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) could destroy the nation’s power grid, a portion of that report included ways to “EMP-proof” your life: Obtain non-electrical appliances; stock up on portable solar panels; self-defense; items to barter, and so on.
The good news, however, is that experts don’t believe an EMP event to the power grid, either via a nuclear explosion in the atmosphere above the country or a massive solar storm, is the biggest threat facing the country.
The bad news is, there most certainly is a major threat to the grid, and it’s actually much worse than analysts and experts thought.
A cyber security firm that has been investigating the world’s first known attack on a nation’s power grid, which occurred in Ukraine in December 2015 — an attack that Russia is suspected of carrying out — says that malware is a much bigger threat to the nation’s grid than previously believed.
In January 2016 Cyberwar.news reported on the Ukrainian cyber attack, which took a major power station offline for several hours and involved the use of malware:
Experts have been warning for years that Western society’s outsized reliance on the Internet to manage critical infrastructure was a growing liability in the age of cyber warfare, and now they have been proven correct.
The cyber security firm analyzing that attack, vArmour, has said it has found a new malware variant that has the potential to take down networks that operate power grids around the world. USA Today reported:
The malicious code is capable of directly controlling electricity substation switches and circuit breakers and could potentially be used to turn off power distribution or to physically damage equipment used in the electricity distribution grid, researchers at ESET wrote in a paper…
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