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The North American Electric Reliability Corp. on Oct. 13 issued an e-mail alert aimed at helping the industry minimize the possibility that a cyberattacker could take advantage of the so-called AURORA vulnerability to incapacitate, or even destroy, elements of the nation's power grid.
AURORA is the code name for an experiment conducted by the Idaho National Laboratory from which researchers concluded that massive physical damage could be done to electric generation equipment simply through unauthorized computer access.
In an Oct. 14 news release, NERC said the recommendations contained in the alert fall into two broad categories: protection and control engineering practices, and electronic and physical security mitigation measures.
NERC explained that an AURORA technical team and federal subject-matter experts have been working to develop a technical library that can be used to "understand the...