Nick Hodge,
Publisher
June 15, 2021
Last month, the hacking collective DarkSide shut down the main pipeline carrying gas to the East Coast with a cyberattack, causing a massive gas shortage and a dangerous wave of panic-buying and hoarding.
It may sound like something out of a science fiction story or a video game.
But it’s actually not the first time a key piece of energy infrastructure has been attacked remotely by hackers, and it’s unlikely to be the last…
Hackers Can Breach Nuclear Power Plants And Installations
If you’re not fazed by hackers turning off the gas spigot to the Northeast, consider the time when India’s largest nuclear power plant got hacked by North Korea.
Back in 2019, the operators of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KNPP) in southern India found malware in their control systems. The malware is believed to be the product of the Lazarus Group, a mysterious hacking collective with links to the North Korean government.
According to KNPP staff, the Lazarus malware was spyware designed to steal data from the plant rather than to damage it.
But it’s worth noting that our own government has launched physically-damaging cyberattacks against nuclear installations in hostile foreign countries before. The Stuxnet malware, which sabotaged Iran’s nuclear program in the late 2000s by causing various machines to overheat and break, is widely believed to be a product of the US National Security Agency.
In sum, cyberattacks against critical energy infrastructure are nothing new… but they seem to be accelerating over time.
So how do we protect ourselves?
It’s not easy to ward off attackers with the way most power plants are set up.
A Single Point of Failure
The US has about 10,500 power plants for a population of 325 million. In other words, each power plant serves, on average, more than 30,000 Americans.
Each of them is a single point of failure that could wipe out power to thousands of families without notice.
What’s more, large industrial installations like power plants are operated using programmable logic controllers (PLCs) — old, clunky computers that orchestrate moving parts of machines.
And the vast majority of PLCs worldwide run on Windows XP — a two-decade-old operating system that is no longer being actively maintained by Microsoft.
In other words, it may not be easy to toughen our large, centralized power plants against cyberattacks.
But that’s not the only way to mitigate the risk of energy cyberterrorism going forward…
Distributed Energy: Reducing Risks By Spreading Them Out
In recent years, engineers have been pushing the US to replace our centralized grid with a distributed energy model of distribution. This involves creating “virtual power plants,” or networks of grid-connected generators, storage systems and flexible-demand consumers.
These networks can supply electricity to the grid and adjust output in response to changing conditions much more flexibly than a traditional power plant can — and often more cheaply, as well.
The distributed energy model “spreads out” a traditional power plant’s single point of failure across many smaller generators, none of which are necessarily essential to keeping the lights on.
As a result, it could be a far more durable means of protecting the US against energy cyberattacks than trying to update every PLC in the country.
And unlike traditional utilities, there’s a new breed of company dominating this new virtual power plant model.
I call it the “Amazon of Energy” — because it’s not only disrupting an entire sector… but it has similar 60,00% gain potential as well.
Call it like you see it,
Nick Hodge
Editor, Daily Profit Cycle
Nick Hodge is the co-owner and publisher of Daily Profit Cycle and Resource Stock Digest. He's also the founder of Hodge Family Office, the umbrella organization for his three premium services: Foundational Profits, Family Office Advantage, and Hodge Family Office . He specializes in private placements and speculations in early stage ventures, and has raised tens of millions of dollars of investment capital for resource, energy, cannabis, and medical technology companies. Co-author of two best-selling investment books, including Energy Investing for Dummies, his insights have been shared on news programs and in magazines and newspapers around the world.
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