Almost every single thing a nation does depends on power — electricity lights the night, moves machinery and enables every kind of industrial process, service performance and social interaction. Protecting the power grid, then, is at the top of critical infrastructure priorities.

"The grid underpins our economy," said Patricia Hoffman, assistant secretary for the Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability within the Department of Energy. "It supports multiple other critical infrastructure sectors such as telecommunications, oil and gas. It supports the banking industry, the health care sector. So it's very critical at a national level."

In the United States, electric grid outages caused by weather events have cost as much as $33 billion in economic losses, she noted. The effects of long-lasting outages on the people includes spoiled food and medicine, communications challenges, hindrances to conducting business and many other effects.

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Critical Risk: Assessing the cybersecurity of the nation's infrastructure

"The goal as we look at any sort of outage that would occur in the United States is really to recover as quickly as possible," she said.

Successful cyberattacks could potentially knock segments of the nation's power grid offline, causing widespread blackouts and all of the consequences that come from an extended power outage, said Suzanne Spaulding, under secretary of the Homeland Security Department's National Protection and Programs Directorate. The blackout in Ukraine at the end of 2015 was an example of what an attacker could do, she said.

"That was the result of a cyberattack, malicious activity designed to, for the first time, bring down critical infrastructure upon which a civilian population depended," she said. "They succeeded in taking down the power in Ukraine for over 225,000 customers."

The incident "has implications not just for the energy sector but for every industry across our critical infrastructure sectors that relies on industrial control systems," she said.

The electric grid is more a grid of grids, regional systems that, however large they may be, are ultimately isolated from each other. That makes a doomsday scenario of a nationwide blackout unlikely. However, the grid still is a networked system, which, while necessary for its operation, also complicates its protection.

"What happens with respect to one utility's experience in a cyber event could affect, in a regional nature, other parts of the system and so therefore we really want to focus on tools and capabilities that can be more regional in nature," Hoffman said. "We don't expect that there would be a national blackout because there's a lot of flexibility in the system and a lot of different technologies and different approaches that the grid operators are taking. But still, it is a networked system, and we have to pay attention to it from a communications and control point of view."

The key for safeguarding any critical infrastructure component, and the electric system in particular, Hoffman said, is resilience. Technology and partnerships with the private industries that operate the grid are the key elements to that, she said.

"The grid operators have a very close relationship with the Department of Energy. We meet regularly with the Electric Sector Coordinating Council. We exercise regularly—the last exercise occurred this past November, where we looked at a combination physical and cyber attack and engaged over 4,500 utility companies as well as over 350 federal government and state entities."

These exercises are just one demonstration of the federal government's commitment to protecting the grid, she said. "So as a cyber security is evolving, we are evolving as we move forward on technology and capabilities to mitigate and respond to this threat."

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