The worst-case scenarios may sound like science fiction. But it wouldn’t take millions of deaths for an attack to have devastating consequences.
One afternoon in late December, a team of hackers surreptitiously entered the computer network of a western Ukrainian power company, Prykarpattyaoblenergo, and began taking control of critical circuit breakers across the region. Employees watched in horror as the cursors on their computer monitors began moving on their own, opening and executing commands at will. One by one, the hackers took electrical substations offline, injecting malware as they went that rendered the entire power grid inoperable. For several hours, some 230,000 people were plunged back into the Stone Age.