Last Tuesday this hearing was very interesting. For a discussion on the power system you can't do much better than Dr. Weiss. His written testimony is pretty good. I disagree with several things he says but that is likely of little substance.
A key point for those thinking about how much this cyber stuff is BS and nerds should stay in the data center.
You, I, we, don't set the rules. In a version of Clausewitz we don't want to think about a total defensive plan is a losing strategy. We have an active cyber insurgency that is costing billions of dollars and we're fighting it with a high intensity military set to defense only. Whiz bang NSA/DOD types with cute tools are like a long range reconnaissance unit far behind enemy lines. They talk about what is going on, but they won't win the war all alone.
The utility infrastructure of the modern world created to centralize management, increase profitability, and decrease man-power requirements are exactly why the problem can't be fixed. The information technology incentives have resulted in the type of linkages that create exploitable systems and capacity to cascading outages. In my opinion cyber warfare is a limited or small war paradigm. Cyber war is a low intensity conflict but there is nothing to say it can't have kinetic real world effects. In fact we know that it has been used to kill people.
Welcome to my world.
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