U.K. Power Grid is Under Attack From Hackers Every Minute, Says Parliament

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-09/power-grid-under-cyber-attack-every-minute-sees-u-k-up-defenses.html

By Jillian Ward
Bloomberg.com
Jan 8, 2015

The U.K. government is one step ahead of hackers trying to turn off the 
country’s lights -- for now.

The prospect of cyber-attacks on the nation’s power network is a major 
threat to the country’s security, according to James Arbuthnot, a member 
of parliament who chaired the Defense Select Committee until last year. He 
plans to visit National Grid Plc (NG/) next month to discuss the issue.

“Our National Grid is coming under cyber-attack not just day-by-day but 
minute-by-minute,” Arbuthnot, whose committee scrutinized the country’s 
security policy, told a conference in London last year. “There are, at 
National Grid, people of very high quality who recognize the risks that 
these attacks pose, and who are fighting them off,” he said, “but we can’t 
expect them to win forever.”

Britain’s electricity transmission network is constantly subject to 
cyber-attack and threats to infrastructure will remain high over the next 
few months, the nation’s Computer Emergency Response Team statistics show. 
More resources are being funneled towards combating the attempted 
intrusions: the Cabinet Office said on Dec. 12 it is increasing spending 
on its cyber-security program to 860 million pounds ($1.3 billion) from an 
original 650 million pounds planned over four years from 2011.

[...]

--
Evident.io - Continuous Cloud Security for AWS.
Identify and mitigate risks in 5 minutes or less.
Sign up for a free trial @ https://evident.io/