White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Cyberattack on the Infrastructure Alarms Petraeus, Coats

Electric power lines and pylons against a blue sky with clouds.

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War always goes for the infrastructure: take out the bridges, cut off the electricity and water supplies. All that used to be done with artillery, tanks and bombs.

Going forward, it will be done by computers: Cyberwar.

Every day the early skirmishes — the tryout phase, if you will – are taking place. There are tens of thousands of probes of U.S. infrastructure by potential enemies, known and unknown, state and non-state. A few get through the defenses.

Jeremy Samide, chief executive officer of Stealthcare, a company which seeks to improve cyberdefenses for a diverse set of U.S. companies, sees the cyber battlefield starkly. He says the threat is very real; and he puts the threat of serious attack at 83 percent.

Jeremy Samide is chief executive officer of Stealthcare.

As Samide looks out across the United States from his base in Cleveland, he sees probes, the term of art for incoming cyberattacks, like an endless rain of arrows. Some, he says, will get through and the infrastructure is always at risk.

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats issued a warning in July that the alarms for our digital infrastructure are “blinking.” He compared the situation to that in the country before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The situation, he told the Hudson Institute in a speech, is “critical.” Coats singled out Russia as the most active of the probers of U.S. infrastructure.

Samide says probing can come from anywhere and Russia may be the most active of the cyber adventurers.

A common scenario, he says, is that the electric grid is target one. But considerable devastation could come from attacking banking, communications, transportation or water supply.

Retired Army Gen. David Petraeus, a former director of the CIA and current chairman of KKR Global Institute, in an article coauthored with Kiran Sridhar and published in Politico on Sept. 5, urges the creation of a new government agency devoted to cybersecurity.

Samide and others endorse this and worry that the government has much vital material spread across many agencies and not coordinated. Behind Petraeus’s thinking is one of the lessons of 9/11: Government departments aren’t good at sharing information.

Conventional wisdom has it that the electric grid is super-vulnerable. But Politico’s cybersecurity reporter David Perera, who consulted experts on the feasibility of taking down the grid, somewhat demurs. In a Politico article, he concluded that the kind of national blackout often theorized isn’t possible because of the complexity of the engineering in the grid and its diversity.

The difficulty, according to Perera, is for the intruder to drill down into the computer-managed engineering systems of the grid and attack the programable controllers, also known as industrial control systems — the devices which run things, like moving load, closing down a power plant or shutting off the fuel supply. They are automation’s brain.

Perera’s article has been read by some as getting the utilities off the hook. But it doesn’t do that: Perera’s piece is not only well-researched and argued but also warns against complacency and ignoring the threat.

John Savage, emeritus professor of computer science at Brown University, says, “I perceive that the risk to all business is not changing very much. But to utilities, it is rising because it appears to be a new front in [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s campaign to threaten Western interests. While I doubt that he would seek a direct conflict with us, he certainly is interested in making us uncomfortable. If he miscalculates, the consequences could be very serious.”

Samide warns against believing that all probes are equal in intent and purpose. He says there are various levels of probing from surveillance (checking on your operation) to reconnaissance (modeling your operation before a possible attack). Actual attacks, ranging from the political to the purely criminal, include ransomware attacks or the increasing cryptojacking in which a hacker hijacks a target’s processing power in order to mine cryptocurrency on the hacker’s behalf.

The threats are global and increasingly the attribution — the source of the attack — concealed. Other tactics, according to Samide, include misdirection: a classic espionage technique for diverting attention from the real aim of the attack.

The existential question is if cyberwar goes from low-grade to high-intensity, can we cope? And how effective are our countermeasures?

Today’s skirmishes are harbingers of the warfighting of the future. — For InsideSources

When the Light Fails — Modern Society’s Weakest Link

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Modern life has a woven-in thread of vulnerability that is peculiar to our times: electricity. It is the cardiovascular and nervous system of life across the world, more so in the Internet Age than even 30 years ago.

If the nation were to lose electricity, it would cause an instant and lethal paralysis that would go beyond inconvenience of the kind parts of New England have just experienced — and that left me charging my cell phone in my car.

Nonetheless, limited and scattered blackouts of the kind I have been caught in are a reminder of what alarmists (alarmists are unsettling, but not always wrong) have been warning. If there is no electricity, there is no light, no water, no sewage treatment, no gas and diesel, no heating and cooling — even gas and oil systems rely on electric pumps and fans. If such a blackout were sustained, slow death through starvation, or fast death through disease and armed gangs ravaging the cities and towns for food, would be the result.

A curtain-raiser is Puerto Rico. Just look to its agony: The mitigation is that there is help from the rest of the United States — imperfect and maybe inadequate, but still help.

In a national blackout, Canada and Mexico might be as affected, and the catastrophe would be complete.

Such a blackout — very unlikely but not inconceivable — is posited to come from a hostile power using a nuclear weapon targeting the special vulnerability that comes with electricity and computerization. The hostile power would not target cities, as in the past, but instead would detonate a nuclear bomb high in the atmosphere, creating an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), which would do the damage. It would cause destructive electric surges, fry electronics and render most things that support daily life in 2017 inoperable.

The phenomenon has been known since the earliest days of nuclear weapons development, during the World War II Manhattan Project. Atmospheric tests by both the United States and the Soviet Union in 1962 gave the world hard evidence. The new urgency comes because some believe North Korea would try such an assault as soon as it perfects its long-range intercontinental missile.

One of the people who takes the EMP threat seriously is nuclear proponent and public policy advocate Richard McPherson of Idaho. He has written to President Trump proposing that Puerto Rico become a test bed for an EMP-hardened electrical grid.

Engineers believe they know how to do this, but the cost would be prohibitive, according to experts I have interviewed at the Electric Power Research Institute and the Edison Electric Institute, respectively the research arm of the electric industry and its trade association.

Robin Manning, EPRI vice president of transmission and distribution infrastructure, says they are studying the EMPs and a progress report is expected in a few weeks.

To believe the North Korean theory, you have to accept that North Korea is run entirely by cartoonish characters like its president, Kim Jong-un, and that they wish to be destroyed in global retaliation, from Europe and even China.

A quieter and very knowledgeable voice comes from Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has visited North Korea’s nuclear sites seven times and has seen some of their most secret installations, including their centrifuges. He has even been allowed to handle a container of plutonium, the raw material of thermonuclear devices.

In a speech at Brown University on Oct. 31, Hecker said that North Korean technology and science is very impressive, and the scientists and engineers running the nuclear program are not mad fanatics but very dedicated to their task. He does not see the small country as an existential threat to the United States, but it is a problem: a problem that must be tackled civilly, through conversation.

“We know nothing about this country and who controls their nuclear arsenal. We need to talk to them, and their denuclearization will come later,” Hecker said.

Meanwhile the long-term security of the electric system remains a national necessity, whether the threat is monster storms, cyberattack or EMPs.

Scott Aaronson, EEI executive director of security and business continuity, says a “holistic” approach for security, embracing all hypothetical disasters, not obsessing on one, is necessary.

The situation in Puerto Rico is not hypothetical. It is an American tragedy of enormous proportions here and now. It is also a frightening window into what can go wrong in this, the Electric Century.

The Uber Effect on Electricity

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Leon Trotsky said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” The same thing might be said about disruptive technologies.
The U.S.. electric system, for example, may not be interested in disruptive technology, but disruptive technology is interested in it. What Uber and Lyft have done to the taxi industry worldwide is just beginning to happen to the electricity industry; and it could shock consumers – particularly the less affluent – as surely as though they had stuck their finger in an electrical outlet.
The disruptive revolution is not only happening here, but also in Europe, as Marc Boillot, senior vice president at Electricite de France (EDF), the giant French utility, writes in a new book.
Ironically, here in the United States, disruption of the otherwise peaceful world of electric generation and sale last year was a bumper one for electric stocks because of their tradition of paying dividends at a time when bond yields were low.
The first wave of disruption to electric generation has been a technology as benign as solar power units on rooftops, much favored by governments and by environmentalists as a green source of electricity. For the utilities, these rooftop generators are a threat to the integrity of the electrical grid. To counter this, utilities would like to see the self-generators pay more for the upkeep of the grid and the convenience it affords them.
Think of the grid as a series of spider webs built around utility companies serving particular population centers, and joined to each other so they can share electricity, depending on need and price.
Enter the self-generating homeowner, who by law is entitled to sell excess production back to the grid, or to buy on the grid when it is very cold or the sun isn’t shining, as at night. The system of selling back to the electric company is known as net metering.
Good deal? Yes, for the homeowner who can afford to install a unit or lease one from one of a growing number of companies that provide that service. Lousy deal for the full-time electricity customer who rents or lives in an apartment building.
There’s the rub: Who pays the cost of maintaining the grid while the rooftop entrepreneur uses it at will? Short answer: everyone else.
In reality, the poor get socked. Take Avenue A with big houses at one end and apartments and tenements at the other. The big houses — with their solar panels and owners' morally superior smiles — are being subsidized by the apartments and tenements. They have to pay to keep the grid viable, while the free-standing house – it doesn't have to be a mansion — gets a subsidy.
It's a thorny issue, akin to the person who can't use Uber or Lyft because he doesn't have a credit card or a smartphone, and has to hope that traditional taxi service will survive.
The electric utilities, from the behemoths to the smallest municipal distributor, see the solution in an equity fee for the self-generating customer's right to come on and off the grid, and for an appreciable difference between his selling and buying price. Solar proponents say, not fair: Solve your own problems. We are generating clean electricity and our presence is a national asset.
EDF's Boillot sees the solution in the utilities’ own technological leap forward: the so-called smart grid. This is the computerization of the grid so that it is more finely managed, waste is eliminated, and pricing structures for homes reflect the exact cost at the time of service. His advice was eagerly sought when he was in Washington recently, promoting his book.
While today’s solar may be a problem for the utilities, tomorrow’s may be more so. Homeowners who can afford it may be able to get off the grid altogether by using the battery in an all-electric car to tide them over during the sunless hours.
The industry is not taking this lying down: It's talking to the big solar firms, the regulators and, yes, to Elon Musk, founder of electric-car maker Tesla Motors. He may be the threat and he may be the savior; those all-electric cars will need a lot of charging, and stations for that are cropping up. There’s a ray of sunshine for the utilities, but it's quite a way off. Meanwhile, the rooftop disruption is here and now. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Pickens and Obama Energy Plans: How Smart Are They?

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The billionaire T. Boone Pickens and President Barack Obama have something in common: a plan for saving us from imported energy. In doing so they hope to reduce air pollution, create jobs and head the country towards a more sustainable energy future.

But Pickens and Obama do not have the same plan. In fact, Pickens has been critical of Obama’s plan; and Obama has been silent on Pickens’ plan.

Where both plans converge is on the billions of tax dollars that will be needed to upgrade the now ramshackle transmission system. This is often called the grid. The fact is it is not a grid at all, but a series of local grids that are sometimes interconnected. Texas is not connected to the rest of the U.S. system, for example.

The first problem with the two plans is that they are aimed specifically at foreign oil but deal with electricity, which we import in small quantities from Canada. Electric imports are not a problem. Both have ideas about how a greener, smarter electric grid will help toward cutting the astonishing amount of oil–20 million barrels a day–we consume in the U.S., 70 percent of it from overseas.

The Pickens plan is fairly straightforward. He wants to build wind farms up the spine of the United States, from Texas to Canada–hundreds of thousands of windmills in the best wind belt in the country. This electricity will be transported from the relatively underpopulated Intermountain West to the heavily populated coastal cities of the East and West.

This electricity would be moved on the new smart grid that everyone is sure is desirable, and on the way if the government foots the bill and there is enough use of eminent domain to force the new lines across private property. One of the reasons the grid is not larger and more flexible today is that it often takes as long as 20 years to overcome the local protest and litigation. Even the abusive use of eminent domain does not block lawsuits over issues like the health effects of large power lines.

To Pickens, this electricity will make it possible to back out the 30 percent of natural gas now being used to generate electricity; and that resource will substitute for oil in large trucks and eventually domestic autos, after the new filling stations are built.

Neat, huh? Maybe in 25 years?

Obama’s plan is more ambitious, but less specific. It seeks a huge increase in wind generation; the use of solar panels in cities; and, of course, the building of a really smart grid, which will give consumers the option to turn off their appliances when electricity is expensive and back on when it is cheap, mostly late at night and early in the morning–midnight suppers and 3 a.m. showers. The relief from imported oil comes in the use of electric cars, hybrid cars and possibly the electrification of some rail lines, where high-speed trains are envisaged.

Under the Obama plan and with his grid, your house will be monitored 24 hours a day for energy usage and it will get helpful directions on energy conservation. Ergo if you are growing plants in the basement, you might not want to sign up. Privacy is an issue. Also, will we go smart? Those who cannot program their VCR might want to dodge the smart grid.

There will be winners and losers. The winners will be the equipment manufacturers (lines, poles, meters, wire, insulators, turbines), civil engineers and, of course, lawyers and consultants. The losers? If the scheme collapses under its own grandeur, it will be taxpayers; job-seekers and ultimately the environment, if the utilities keep burning coal for more than half of their production. If the windmills are built under either scheme, birds and bats will get it. Both species are already slaughtered by the tens of thousands by flying into wind turbine blades.

While gasoline is cheap, the lights are on and the thermostat is set either too low or too high, it is going to be hard to tell people they have to change–and pay for it.