Power grids operating in Los Angeles County in California, and Salt Lake County in Utah claimed that they were hit by a powerful DDoS cyber attack on March 5th of this year. However, the authorities have cleared the air that the impact of the attack was never passed onto the customers or the computer systems used within the electrical grid and so it went unnoticed by the media.
News is out that the attack was a distributed denial of service(DDoS) attack variant which interrupted the services to a partial note in the generation department.
According to a filing of the Department of Energy(DOE), the event did not disrupt the customers with an outage or the services of the grid. But yes, it showed a slight impact on the generation of electricity to a certain extent as it was curtailed in time by the IT staff.
Now, the big question is ‘Can the power utilities prepare for a far more sophisticated attack, which the FBI alerted in December’18’.
Cybersecurity Insiders has learned from a source from CNBC that the attacks showed a slight impact on the operations in Kern County of California and Converse County of Wyoming.
Information regarding who launched the attack is yet to be known, but the US governing authorities have raised their suspicion finger on Russia, Iran, and China
Note- This happens to be the first cybersecurity audit report released by Department of Energy in 2019.
