Ted Koppel: Denying cyberattack risk to US electric grid ‘the height of naiveté’

Ted Koppel may be a decade removed from his last broadcast as an anchorman but he remains in the news business and his “nose got that twitch” when he smelled a good story in the cybersecurity of the US electrical grid.

“This is not a new issue,” Koppel told Advisen during a telephone interview. “The president on down—official reports have been written for years from a multitude of government committees and agencies—all talking about this as an inevitability.

“The consequences are huge but hardly any attention is being paid to it.”

So goes the story behind Koppel’s new book, “Lights Out,” which outlines the terrifying possibilities of a country in turmoil and desperation from a cyberattack on the electrical grid. Imagine no running water; empty supermarket shelves; hospital machines cannot be used for patients; cell phone and laptop batteries cannot be charged; panic ensues when answers and direction are unavailable from leaders.

Most frightening, said Koppel, is the fact there is no plan if a cyberattack against our electrical grid occurs—potentially putting at least tens of millions of people in the dark for a much longer time than anyone has ever experienced.

The implications are immense and immeasurable.

“The Internet was never designed to be defended,” Koppel said. “It did not contemplate hackers. In this ecosystem we are artificially imposing defense mechanisms.”

In the meantime, business and consumer practices call for us to become more dependent on the Internet (which Koppel readily calls a “weapon of mass destruction”), creating more openings.

“Every new opening is another way for a hacker to get in and track backwards,” he said. In this case the Internet can give access to all the computerized systems used to operate the grid efficiently and safely.

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