Protecting the Energy Sector

The energy sector is very vulnerable. In 2008, an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency stated publicly that cyberattacks had already been used to disrupt electrical power in multiple cities outside the United States (McMillan, 2008). This alarming report and others, however, fail to describe the extent to which a complex system such as a national electric grid could be vulnerable to cyberattacks. 

Demonstrations of a cyberattack were exemplified against control systems that regulate an electric generator in Idaho. In this demonstration, under the code name Aurora, the Department of Energy s Idaho National Laboratory manipulated the generator s controls to exploit system weaknesses, which caused the generator to 

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