How safe is our electric grid? Pakistan sends a warning

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/26/world/asia/widespread-blackout-in-pakistan-deals-another-blow-to-government.html?_r=0

"ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Towns and cities across Pakistan plunged into darkness early Sunday when what officials said was an attack by militants on a transmission line short-circuited the national electricity grid, presenting a new indictment of the government’s faltering efforts to solve the country’s chronic power crisis.

Emergency efforts to end the blackout, widely described as Pakistan’s worst ever, resulted in a partial restoration of power in the capital, Islamabad, and the most populous city, Karachi, by Sunday evening. Even so, 80 percent of the country remained without power, including the provincial capitals of Lahore, Peshawar and Quetta, an official said."

So how safe is our electricity grid?

"The specter of a large-scale, destructive attack on the U.S. power grid is at the center of much strategic thinking about cybersecurity. For years, Americans have been warned by a bevy of would-be Cassandras in Congress, the administration and the press that hackers are poised to shut it down.
But in fact, the half-dozen security experts interviewed for this article agreed it’s virtually impossible for an online-only attack to cause a widespread or prolonged outage of the North American power grid. Even laying the groundwork for such a cyber operation could qualify as an act of war against the U.S. — a line that few nation-state-backed hacker crews would wish to cross."

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/09/power-grid-safety-110815.html#ixzz3Q2jB12B9