The time has come for the U.S. government to focus a single agency’s efforts on reinforcing the security of the electrical grid, MIT researchers said today in a wide-rangingreport.
The issue, MIT’s researchers say, is that the many stakeholders involved in maintaining the U.S. electrical grid aren’t working together, even though “cybersecurity regulations for bulk power systems already exist in the form of the NERC Critical Infrastructure Protection reliability standards.” For one, the researchers point out, those standards only apply to “the bulk power system and [do] not include the distribution system.” Distribution utilities on the local level are operating outside current regulations, making managing the entire grid practically impossible, the researchers added.