What will Biden do to defend the electricity grids from hackers
The United States announces a plan to protect the power grid from foreign hackers, according to Bloomberg
The White House unveiled on Tuesday a 100-day plan intended to protect the U.S. power grid from cyber-attacks, primarily by creating a stronger relationship between U.S. national security agencies and the mostly private utilities that run the electric system.
The plan is among the first big steps towards fulfilling the Biden administration's promise to urgently improve the country's cyber defenses. The nation's energy system is both highly vulnerable to hacking and a target for adversaries of nation-states seeking to counter the U.S. advantage in conventional military and economic power, Bloomberg reports.
"The United States faces a well-documented and growing cyber threat from malicious actors trying to shut off the electricity Americans rely on to power our homes and businesses," said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.
Although the plan is heralded as a 100-day sprint – which includes a series of consultations between utilities and the government – it will likely take years to fully implement, experts say. It will ask public services to pay for and install technology to better detect attacks by the specialized computers that run the country's power systems, known as industrial control systems.
While an earlier draft proposed helping small utilities and rural cooperatives pay for the new monitoring, the final version is more vague as to whether the money will come from the federal government or be passed on to customers in the form of higher bills. Large utilities often have sophisticated security teams and pay for state-of-the-art monitoring technology, but it's unclear how enthusiastically smaller utilities will bear the cost of additional security.
The government will take suggestions from public services within 21 days on ways to incentivize participation in the voluntary effort, according to the details of the plan described by a person familiar with it.
The final plan also abandons the draft proposal to improve supply chain security for network components, requiring a list of recommended equipment suppliers. Now, the administration plans to ask the utilities for suggestions for improvement.
Experts say initiatives to improve US power grid security are years behind more well-known efforts to protect corporate data centers and systems. At the same time, hackers from Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are launching increasingly aggressive attacks on US power companies, hoping to install malware that could leave cities and countries in the dark.
(Extract from the press review of Epr )
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/energia/stati-uniti-rete-elettrica-hacker/ on Sat, 24 Apr 2021 06:00:47 +0000.