The CIA says that computer hackers shut down foreign power grids in extortion schemes, reports Fox News. All of the attacks happened outside of the U.S., but that doesn’t mean that we should believe that our power supply is safe from sabotage because the successful attacks have happened in foreign countries.

The attacks are coming from foreign governments and militaries, according to the report.

Hackers literally turned out the lights in multiple cities after breaking into electrical utilities and demanding extortion payments before disrupting the power, a senior CIA analyst told utility engineers at a trade conference.

All the break-ins occurred outside the United States, said senior CIA analyst Tom Donahue. The U.S. government believes some of the hackers had inside knowledge to cause the outages. …

There has been “a huge increase in focused attacks on our national infrastructure networks”in the past year and a half, “and they have been coming from outside the United States,” cybersecurity expert Ralph Logan told the Washington Post in commenting on the CIA assessment.

Logan told the Post that the coordinated attacks came from foreign governments or militaries, not terrorist groups.

Technorati Tags: CIA, computer hackers, crime, power grid

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