Power grid’s failing infrastructure at risk of cyberattack 

Power grid’s failing infrastructure at risk of cyberattack.
Tuesday’s power failure in Washington has once again raised questions about the vulnerability of America’s electric power grid.

Fox News National Security Analyst KT McFarland spoke to experts Darren Hammell and Jonathan Pollet about potential threats.

The power grid “is very vulnerable, whether its physical attacks, mistakes like this one or even cyberattacks … there have been a lot of high visibility outages lately and there are just more we can expect,” said Hammell, chief strategy officer and co-founder of the energy management firm Princeton Power Systems.

Other notable incidents include last December’s power outage in Detroit caused by an aging underground cable failing. In 2011, a major transmission line went offline, causing outages in Arizona and Southern California.

“The problem is we’ve taken this old infrastructure and only upgraded the computer technology … but the actual assets are still old,” Pollet, founder of consulting firm Red Tiger Security, told FoxNews.com.

Through the Recovery Act, the Energy Department has so far invested roughly $4.5 billion to modernize and enhance the reliability of the nation’s grid.

Without action, the current setup will allow for potential cyberattacks against the system.  

“We’ve taken an infrastructure that is older and we have this modernized equipment on top of it that is vulnerable to the same type of hacking attack that you see with [companies] like Target,” said Pollet.