Compromised Power Grid Demonstrates That We Need Security Standards

Do we really want to build this smart grid…for it only to be used against us? We've got to be sure those smart meters are protected.

I spoke these words two weeks before Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal broke the news that cyberspies, most likely from China and Russia, had penetrated the cybergrid that controls the US electrical supply, and and had left behind potentially disruptive software. I wasn't a bit surprised.

The CIA has already admitted that cities have been taken down by criminal activities, by attacks. American users of electricity are lucrative targets. I have been urging the US not to build all our houses and homes into this thing and make it all vulnerable.

The U.S. airlines were just as vulnerable on September 10, 2001 as they were on September 11, but they weren't aware of it. We're living in pre-9/11 days in the Internet. We're vulnerable to attack but we just don't see it. We must start creating those standards.

People are looking at enablement, not figuring out vulnerabilities that enablement brings. But there has to be a standard for putting things online, especially when it concerns our national security.