Electric Grid Shutdown Paper

“Today 's failure is a dramatic reminder of the importance of the uninterrupted flow of power to the health, safety, and well being of our citizens and the defense of our country.

with no turn on communicated from the electric company, due to so many power outages, and the weather being so detrimental, the community is starting to panic. Some people have had their roofs cave in, others cannot start their vehicles. Hospitals in the area are treating many victims for hypothermia and some deaths related to the cold. People are running out of wood for their fireplaces and most people did not have any emergency packs created for possible disasters like this.

Informational technology is difficult to secure because of many different factors: the attacks do not have to occur at the location of the attack, so they can happen from anywhere worldwide, there is little co-operation between existing cyber security groups, and it is difficult to find vulnerabilities and patch them before an attack. One pressing matter in cyber security now is infrastructure, such as power plants, which runs on old technology that is susceptible to complex attacks by hackers. Many actors, including government, individual groups, and businesses all spend time dealing with, or paying for a lack of, cyber security. A safer way to deal with these problems would be to co-operate, as these attacks could cause harm or disrupt businesses. In the worst case scenario, millions of dollars’ worth of information could be stolen or destroyed. These problems highlight the critical need for an improved

In the test, “the U.S. government showed how hackers could take down a power plant by physically destroying a generator using just a few lines of code.” The attack works “when a circuit breaker or breakers are opened or closed [automatically], resulting in an out-of-phase condition which damages alternating current (AC) equipment connected to the grid” (Swearingen). The belligerent party had to simply disable the system’s self-regulation. While small, consumer-style devices connected to the internet are not prone to such widespread effect, both are, ultimately, susceptible to breaches as per their connection to the

The Northeast blackout of 2003 was one of the most critical blackouts in the history which affected more than 50 million people in both the United States and Canada. The main cause of this disaster was a software bug in the energy management system used by FirstEnergy Corporation, located in Akron, Ohio. This is a perfect example of poor quality coding may led to a big disaster.

The United States is constantly under threat from man-made and natural hazards, which can occur with or without warning and often involve an impact on some form of infrastructure. DHS (2013) deemed infrastructure as critical when it involves:

By virtue of the fact that these events are able to disable entire systems, nationally, regionally or worst globally a gigantic collaborative effort by all countries is required to address these issues.

ready to evade all computer intrusions. A single breach would inevitably lead to chaos striking

Critical infrastructure is defined in the Patriot Act as systems and assets, physical or virtual, so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health and safety, or any combination of those matters ("Homeland Security Digital Library). In order for the communities in America to thrive and survive there are certain components that needs to remain functional. Functionality of those components needs to be re-established in a timely matter if an emergency or disaster strikes.

The critical infrastructure includes telecommunication, transportation, energy, banking, finance, water supply, emergency services, government services, agriculture, and other fundamental systems and services that are critical to the security, economic prosperity, and social well-being of the public. The critical infrastructure is characterized by interdependencies and complexity. Cyber interdependencies are a result of the pervasive computerization and automation of infrastructures. The critical infrastructure disruptions can, directly and indirectly, affect other infrastructures, impact large geographic regions, and send ripples throughout the national and global economy. For example, under normal operating conditions, the electric power infrastructure requires fuels, transportation, water, banking and finance, telecommunication, and SCADA systems for monitoring and control.

The models developed for this research focused on addressing the following question: What is the likelihood of an outage occurrence? Based on the expected effect of weather, demographics, and socioeconomic features on outages, some hypotheses to be tested are as follows:

lines down and electricity can't be bad. These scenarios are nothing compared to the day

NBC’s show, Revolution explores what life might be like almost 20 years after a worldwide blackout hits North America. The blackout in Revolution was an “artificially-caused apocalyptic event occurring in September 2012” (Revolution, 2014.) This event disabled all electricity. The blackout was originally a combat test on the Taliban, but a malfunction of Nanites caused a worldwide loss of power. 15 years later, power becomes briefly restored by the main characters Rachel and Aaron.

Physical link failures, network congestion/overloads and network failures as the most common causes of network outages by far. Some of the specific causes for outages are chip failures in network equipment, overheating due to broken air conditioning, board faults in network equipment, power outages and transmission equipment not working, bad weather can also have a big effect on the equipment on the tower.

The protection of CII has been an international concern. It was reported by the OECD in May 2008 that many countries have national plans or strategies for protecting critical infrastructure. These policies generally define ‘critical infrastructure’ as physical or intangible assets whose destruction or disruption would severely undermine public safety, social order and the fulfillment of essential government duties. Such harm would by and large be cataclysmic and extensive. Wellsprings of significant framework hazard could be regular (e.g., tremors or surges) or human-made (e.g., psychological oppression, undermine).