The Department of Homeland Security reported today that cyberspies, likely from China and Russia, have managed to inject malicious software into electric grid, water, sewage, and other infrastructure control software.  This software could enable malicious users to take control of key facilities or networks via the Internet, causing power outages and tremendous damage to all sectors of the economy.  The intrusions, unnoticed by the companies chartered with running these networks, were found by U.S. intelligence agencies as part of a comprehensive cybersecurity effort.

This malicious software represents a very real, systemwide national security problem in our electric power system.

But this should take no one by surprise.  The inability of the electric power sector to keep up with even rudimentary information technology upgrades has left us vulnerable across the board to attacks from foreign nations and bored teenagers alike.

For example, a few years ago a Google Earth document was widely distributed with the entire US transmission system mapped out, including substations and major transmission lines. The document had made to a variety of countries through Google Earth’s forum system before Google finally banned the file from its systems.  However, files like these, once created, continue to exist in the hard drives of hundreds of users across the world.

It is clear that we are entering an era where security “most of the time” will not be good enough.  Not only will we have to find ways to better manage our information technology systems, but we will also have to make our infrastructure more resistant to attack at a fundamental level.

Knowledge is increasingly becoming the ammunition in this battle, as opposed to nuclear or chemical weapons.  As “A Nation At Risk” outlined in 1983, the greatest national security danger that we face is the deterioration of our education system and our inability to keep up with other nations in this regard:

“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.”

Over the long term, the only way to ensure our national security in information technology will be to hold a systematic advantage in knowledge and innovation.

Read the Wall Street Journal Article on the Cyber Invasion of Our Electric Grid

Read “A Nation At Risk”