Senators urge Trump to investigate Russian threat to our power grid

How do we prepare for a cyber-threat that could demolish our power grid almost immediately? That’s the question on the minds of 19 senators (and the rest of us), who implored President Trump to investigate the threat of Russian grid-hacking.

Forget nuclear Armageddon. The greatest threat to civilization comes in the form of EMPs and malware. This isn’t exactly new – various calamities have wreaked havoc on our aging power grid for decades. An electromagnetic pulse – caused by a nuclear detonation in the atmosphere – could take the entire nation offline and hurl us back to the Stone Age in weeks, or even days.

But the malware attack in the Ukrainian capital last December exposed a new threat – a scalable cyber-threat that could adapt to various systems and cause widespread and catastrophic blackouts. The "CrashOverride" attack was fully automated, and according to Wired, the grid-hack took out a fifth of Kiev’s total power capacity for about an hour. And experts believe it was just a dry run.

Because the malware required minimal supervision, and because it “includes swappable, plug-in components that could allow it to be adapted to different electric utilities, easily reused, or even launched simultaneously across multiple targets,” it could inflict cataclysmic damage on a much wider scale.

According to one source, the malware could “automatically trip breakers within a grid that prevent power lines from becoming overloaded,” and the damage is nearly incalculable.

Either way, a catastrophic grid failure would erase our technological edge over rogue states and terrorist groups (to say nothing of rivals like Russia and China) almost immediately.

And the alleged perpetrators behind the Kiev attack, Sandworm (a group with supposed Russian ties), also attacked US energy firms in 2014, so they’re no stranger to these shores.

A group of senators – headlined by luminaries like Bernie Sanders and Al Franken – recently signed a letter to Trump urging immediate action. They claimed that “Russia has developed a tool called CrashOverride, the first ever malware framework to specifically attack electric grids ... the Russians and other foreign actors have the capability, and potentially the intent, to cause significant damage to our economy by attacking our critical energy infrastructure....”

In a rare bit of restraint (especially for politicians), these senators likely understated the potential threat.

This particular threat reaches across the political aisle. Our power grids comprise the backbone of this nation, and protecting them should be our top priority.