The great vulnerability of the electrical grid, allowing the distribution of electrical current throughout the United States, is a matter of major concern to American leaders and the military. The gigantic blackout of 2003, linked to cascading phenomena originating from procedural errors within the company FirstEnergy, and which deprived nearly 50 million Americans and Canadians of power, confirmed what the authorities Americans knew since 1965, and the great black out of New York. Apart from accidents, bad handling or terrorist acts, one of the main threats to this inherently unstable network is of cyber origin, as was the case in India in 2020 when a group of Chinese hackers attacked the Indian electric grid as a retaliatory measure against incidents in the highlands of Ladakh.
This is the reason why the DARPA, the Pentagon's critical innovation agency, was seized of the problem, and developed a series of technologies aimed at detecting, identifying and potentially countering cyber attacks against the US power grid. And if it were to collapse all the same, DARPA has undertaken, for a few years, to develop technologies allowing the network to be reassembled in the shortest possible time. The program was named Rapid Attack Detection, Isolation, and Characterization Systems or RADICS, and its official launch took place in 2017. A large part of the technologies in this program have now passed a series of severe tests, and some of them are now gradually being deployed on the US electricity grid in order to allow the authorities to react to the problem. to a cyber attack if necessary.
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