This has been on the radar of the NAE (National Academy of Engineering) for quite a while. Here's an article that was published in 2010 and talks about the ris

This has been on the radar of the NAE (National Academy of Engineering) for quite a while. Here's an article that was published in 2010 and talks about the risks of an attack on the power grid: https://www.nae.edu/Publications/Bridge/TheElectricityGrid/18868.aspx https://www.nae.edu/Publications/Bridge/TheElectricityGrid/1... Some interesting takeaways Recent media reports, in April 2009, for example, highlighted penetrations of the U.S. electricity system by hackers. In November 2009, 60 Minutes aired a piece confirming rumors of break-ins to the Brazilian energy system in 2005 and 2007. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission confirmed that in January 2003, the Microsoft SQL Server worm known as “Slammer” infected a private computer network at the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in Oak Harbor, Ohio, and disabled a safety monitoring system for nearly five hours. Fortunately the plant was off-line at the time. In January 2008, the Central Intelligence Agency reported knowledge of four disruptions, or threatened disruptions, by hackers of the power supplies for four cities. Clearly, these attacks have been ongoing for a while. NAE also points out keeping software updated can lag far behind the threats: Another problem today is that security patches are sometimes not supplied to end-users, or they are supplied but are not applied for fear of impacting system performance. Current practice is to apply an upgrade/patch only after SCADA vendors have thoroughly tested and validated it, which can sometimes take several months.