Rising incidents of domestic terrorism and a surge in state-sponsored cyber attacks on critical infrastructure are posing a heightened risk to the U.S. power system, the nation’s grid reliability authority warned last week.
The geopolitical turmoil from the Israeli-Hamas conflict and the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war is driving a dramatic increase in malicious cyber activity, according to the North American Electric Reliability Corp., a nonprofit body in charge of setting reliability standards for the wholesale power system. Those international tensions are adding to the steady increase in domestic physical threats against the power infrastructure that are likely to climb as the U.S. election season ramps up.
“The current geopolitical situation has significant ramifications for the North American grid,” Manny Cancel, senior vice president at NERC, told reporters Thursday, and that’s contributed to “a dramatic increase in malicious cyber activity.”
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