Name: How Secure Is The United States Power Grid?
Uploaded: 2021-01-03T05:33:30.000Z
Duration: 14 min 14 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

From transportation, to telecommunications,

The digitization of our infrastructure has made

our daily lives more convenient, but it's also

opened us up to the threat of cyberattacks.

Yahoo's hack of over 500 million accounts will

Equifax, which, as you know, is a very large

supplier of credit information, has announced a

cybersecurity incident that they say potentially

consumers. Marriott announcing that up to 500

million guests with reservations at Starwood

Properties could have had their data compromised.

But it's not just companies under attack.

Increasingly, power plants and other critical

infrastructures are also becoming a target.

Critical infrastructure is really anything that

Everything from transportation and airlines to

banks. Cyberwarfare is the new weapon of choice.

You can run a cyberattack remotely, shut down the

critical infrastructure of other countries,

create massive destruction of refineries and

chemical plants without ever shooting a gun.

Electricity is so prevalent in our lives that we

often don't even think about it until it fails to

work. All electricity starts at a generator,

which can be powered by wind, water, coal or even

nuclear fission. After it is generated, the

electricity travels from the power plant to

transmission substations, which convert it to a

very high voltage so that it can travel long

distances. From there, the electricity travels

along power lines to another transformer, which

again converts the power, this time to a lower

voltage, before it goes into our homes and

businesses. Often people think of the power grid

It's really not. It's a quilt made up of 3,000 or

But most of them are rural electric associations,

The focus of the regulation is to prevent the

bulk electric system from suffering a widespread

companies that are serving smaller cities or

rural areas. On one hand, smaller power companies

in the United States may not be as juicy of a

target because they have a small amount of

susceptible to cyberattacks because they don't

have a big as security team or a big as security

budget to focus on protecting their critical

As a consultant for cybersecurity firm, FireEye,

part of Sistrunk's job involves teaching a

digital forensics class for people who want to

learn how to defend the control systems running

our power plants. And to learn how to defend

against an attack, you first have to learn to

hack. This is a small PLC, programmable logic

controller. This particular device is made by

Phoenix Contact and it's basically easy to for an

Sistrunk demonstrated how a hacker may alter the

functions of "stop" and "go" buttons that in a

power facility may control something like a motor

or a pump. This is a web page of this PLC and

it's been hacked. You can see whenever I try to

click on the red stop button, the green start

So an attacker can go download the software and

In a conventional warfare attack, the first thing

refineries, the electrical systems, the chemical

plants, those things that fuel the war machine.

You can simply do the same thing remotely with

cyberweapons. It seems like attackers have

crossed the Rubicon or they've crossed the red

You know, that they are going after control

Today, there are more than 9,700 power plants in

the US. Many of them were built decades ago when

operating a plant required a lot of manual labor

and cybersecurity was not a consideration.

But that's changing. Starting in the mid '80s and

early 2000s, the industry started connecting

these control systems through the enterprise

networks to the internet, for the benefit of

remote access, information sharing, etc..

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How Secure Is The United States Power Grid?

critical

access

compromise

physical