Last week, President Trump made a major “power play,” ordering the Department of Energy to harden our electrical grid from attack by our enemies. The threat, the president insists, “represents a national emergency.” Among other thing, the order will create a new energy infrastructure task force to set “procurement policies.”
White House makes a ‘power play’ to protect the grid
On Friday, President Donald Trump approved an executive order aimed at shielding the American electrical grid “from cyber and other attacks. According to a senior official with the DOE, the order isn’t a response to “any new threat.” Instead, it is “the result of a process to bolster the power system.”
Because the threat is now classified as a national emergency, the energy secretary is authorized to consult with other officials. Between them, they can decide to “prohibit acquisition, importation, transfer or installation of power equipment from an adversary that they determine poses a risk of sabotage to the U.S. power system.”
That makes it a lot harder for the Russians or Chinese to hack our power plants. “It is imperative the bulk-power system be secured against exploitation and attacks by foreign threats,” asserts Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette. He expects the new authority to “greatly diminish the ability of foreign adversaries to target our critical electric infrastructure.”
Bulk power equipment would include anything that goes into substations, control rooms or power plants, from capacitors and transformers to entire nuclear reactors. There is lots of vulnerable generators and other equipment to protect.
No specific threat named
The order doesn’t point the finger at any country in particular but according to the 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment, China, Russia and other countries were already “using cyber techniques to spy on U.S. infrastructure,” Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats writes.
We believe that the Russians were behind “a campaign of cyber attacks over at least two years that targeted the power grid including nuclear power and manufacturing facilities.” That was the very first time that Washington was confidant enough in their findings to publicly accuse the Kremlin of “hacking into American energy infrastructure.”
One of the most effective things that the new rules will accomplish is to prevent buying equipment with built in “back-doors.” Because of the way the system works, contracts are “awarded to the lowest-cost bids, a vulnerability that can be exploited by those with malicious intent.”
Along with the Energy secretary, secretaries of defense, commerce, and national intelligence will have seats on the panel, “among other officials.”
It’s about time!