Cyber attackers ‘far worse’ than Blackout Friday
BLACKOUT Friday’s failure of the national grid plunged more than a million people into darkness but would “pale into insignificance” compared to a cyber attack on our electricity supplies, experts warned last night.
Homes and businesses were hit by the country’s biggest power outage in a decade, which caused widespread disruption to rail networks, traffic light systems and hospitals.
Though the reason behind the two almost simultaneous failures of the gas-fired power station at Little Barford, Cambridgeshire, and the Hornsea offshore wind farm is still not known, bosses at National Grid are “confident” it was no cyber attack.
But an attack by a rogue state such as Russia or North Korea is “almost inevitable” and would cause much more damage in terms of financial loss and undermining of confidence by investors, said Dr Edward Oughton, senior research associate University of Oxford.
A report he wrote earlier this year said London would lose £114million a day if hit by an attack affecting 14 distribution substations, such as the one that struck Ukraine in 2015.
Such an attack, done remotely, would lead to a “cascading failure” across telecoms, fresh water supply, waste water and railways. It would also damage labour supply, at business confidence and investment. The blitz on 30 Ukrainian substations was the first of its kind and led to a loss of power for 225,000 people.
“If you think Friday’s outage was bad, it would pale into insignificance compared with a deliberate cyber attack,” warned Dr Oughton, of the UK Infrastructure Transitions Research Consortium.
“Yes, it caused chaos but it was relatively small. But a cyber attack would be much larger in terms of social and economic impact, and in longevity.
“We know such attacks are possible because we’ve seen them happen in the rest of the world. It’s only a matter of time until we see a similar event here.”
While power generation centres are fairly well protected, the real vulnerability lies with sub stations that distribute electricity, he said.
“Our expectation is that Iran, for instance, would target power generation plants and we have back-up systems to mitigate this.
“But it’s more than likely that other nation states have a better understanding of our infrastructure and know how to penetrate it.”
A National Grid spokesman confirmed that Friday’s blackout lasted 15 minutes and was “a rare and unusual event”. He added: “We will continue to investigate, with the generators involved and wider stakeholders, to understand the lessons learned.”