Attack on Ukrainian Power Grid Sparks Long-term Concerns

The taxonomy of cybersecurity often includes alarming declarations on par with acts of war. But cyber campaigns outside of active conflict hardly meet such a coercive threshold. While there are major concerns over the cybersecurity of the nation’s critical infrastructure – the power grid, water treatment plants, transportation hubs, energy production, and even election systems – it is important to add nuance to the discussion. The Cipher Brief’s Levi Maxey spoke with Robert M. Lee, a former Cyber Warfare Operations Officer in the U.S. Air Force who founded Dragos, an industrial cybersecurity company that investigated the allegedly Russian cyber attacks on the Ukrainian power grid, about where cyber operations turn from mere intrusions to disruptive attack with physical consequences and what to look for should nations seek to disrupt the critical assets that their target societies depend on.