Attack on Power Stations is a New Level of Threat

As tens of thousands of people in Moore County North Carolina are in the dark and cold as a result of attacks on two power stations in the county.

The power stations were intentionally targeted by domestic terrorists who targeted gunfire on the substations’ transformers.

While the county is not releasing many details and the FBI has been brought into the investigation, officials say that whoever carried out the attack knew exactly what they were doing.

While this is far from the first time this has happened, it is affecting more people than the typical past attack.

Two things are important to know.

First, there are tens of thousands of substations like this one around the country and most of them are only secured by a fence. This allows terrorists to relatively easily launch attacks. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that these terrorists would ever face justice.

Second, these transformers are huge and it is unlikely that there are a lot of “spares” just lying around. Many of this devices are made overseas and can take a year to get a replacement.

While Homeland Security has been working with utilities to figure out how to Band-Aid fixes, this is only one small part of protecting critical infrastructure.

Gas pipelines, oil pipelines, electric, water, phone, Internet and wastewater are all vulnerable and it would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to protect all of this, if that is even possible.

I am not going to go into any detail on how to launch these attacks, but we have already seen many of these attacks. Colonial Pipeline is one recent attack we saw in the US and recently terrorists sawed through many fiber optic cables ringing Paris in an effort to shut down Internet service. In Florida and Kansas we have seen cyber attacks on the drinking water supply.

We can continue to pretend that there is not a problem, but that won’t change anything – it is a very serious problem and the bad people know it.

Credit: New York Times

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