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LISA MULLINS: Here in the United States, there's also concern that technology could be manipulated by potential enemies. A story in the Wall Street Journal this morning says that cyber-spies from Russia and China have penetrated the United States electrical grid. The story reports that these spies left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system. It's one example of a threat to national security that's getting more and more attention. The World's Alex Gallafent reports.

ALEX GALLAFENT: Here's one view of our modern world.

ROD BECKSTROM: The new reality we live in is that we're moving more and more devices to be connected to networks.

GALLAFENT: This is Rod Beckstrom. He's a former director of the federal government's National Cybersecurity Center. And he says that anything connected to a network, with its own internet protocol address – it's location online – is vulnerable to attack.

BECKSTROM: So every day, with every new, you know, IT capable cell phone we've got or IT integrated refrigerator or industrial control system, the more we keep networking things – which we're doing as surely as an apple falls from a tree to the ground, we're increasing the vulnerability of our systems.

GALLAFENT: And if you're a cyber-spy looking for one of those systems to penetrate and control, the national electric grid looks pretty attractive.

BECKSTROM: If you can compromise or shut down an electrical power system, then you bring down everything else with it that's reliant upon that electricity, including you know, computer systems, production systems, companies – you know, virtually an entire city or region.

GALLAFENT: Possible candidates for the source of cyberspying against the United States might include sophisticated terror groups – and more likely, nation states. China, for one. Also, Russia. Jim Lewis is a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

JIM LEWIS: Nation states build weapons, and they plan to use those weapons, right? So the Russians have the airplanes, missiles, submarines, all of which they have plans to use against the United States, should they need to.

GALLAFENT: And, says Lewis, just as Russia and China have plans involving the use of missiles and planes, they also have plans for using cyberattacks against the US electrical grid.

LEWIS: So, sure – they haven't triggered them, just like they haven't triggered any of their other military options. But if it came to a crisis, if there was a crisis in the Taiwan Straits or over Georgia, then we could expect to see something like this.

GALLAFENT: The problem is – to use the jargon – asymmetric vulnerability, something that wasn't a worry 20 years ago.

LEWIS: In the Cold War you had symmetric vulnerability – we had cities; they had cities. We had missiles; they had missiles. So we held each other hostage. Currently, though, we're much more dependent on networks than the Russians or any of our other potential opponents – the Chinese, or whoever you want to pick. And so there isn't that matching vulnerability, and so we would suffer more from an attack than they would, even if we both have exactly the same capability. And that's the problem – we are more vulnerable.

GALLAFENT: So who handles the problem in this country? Well, lots of people, according to former National Cybersecurity Center chief, Rod Beckstrom.

BECKSTROM: There's multiple parties that are involved in this game. And clearly the most important parties are the utilities themselves and those that own and manage those grids, and they're virtually entirely in the private sector.

GALLAFENT: But then you've got the government, the Departments of Energy, Homeland Security, and Defense. Plus the US intelligence community. It's a confused picture, says Jim Lewis.

LEWIS: A friend of mine described our efforts as a collection of well meaning bumper cars, meaning everyone's driving around as fast as they can but there is no central plan.

GALLAFENT: Lewis says the Obama administration is working on that. But even then, that doesn't take care of the private sector. Allan Paller runs the Sans Institute, an information security organization based in Maryland. He says the outgoing Bush administration ignored that part of the equation.

PALLER: The last administration was focused on faith-based security, where they had faith the utilities would protect them and faith the hardware and software vendors would sell secure systems. That's been totally debunked.

GALLAFENT: So the challenge for the Obama administration is to keep pressure on the private sector to match the government's own efforts in dealing with cybersecurity. One former government official told me that a cyber attack on the electrical grid might result in a simple blackout. Even if it didn't last long, the worry is what might happen during those moments in the dark. For The World, I'm Alex Gallafent.

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