Hackers allied with the Russian government have devised a cyberweapon that has the potential to be the most disruptive yet against electric systems that Americans depend on for daily life, according to U.S. researchers.

The malware, which researchers have dubbed CrashOverride, is known to have disrupted only one energy system — in Ukraine in December. In that incident, the hackers briefly shut down one-fifth of the electric power generated in Kiev.

But with modifications, it could be deployed against U.S. electric transmission and distribution systems to devastating effect, said Sergio Caltagirone, director of threat intelligence for Dragos, a cybersecurity firm that studied the malware and issued a report Monday.

And Russian government hackers have shown their interest in targeting U.S. energy and other utility systems, researchers said.

“It’s the culmination of over a decade of theory and attack scenarios,” Caltagirone warned. “It’s a game changer.”

The revelation comes as the U.S. government is investigating a wide-ranging, ambitious effort by the Russian government last year to disrupt the U.S. presidential election and influence its outcome. That campaign employed a variety of methods, including hacking hundreds of political and other organizations, and leveraging social media, U.S. officials said.

Dragos has named the group that created the new malware Electrum, and it has determined with high confidence that Electrum used the same computer systems as the hackers who attacked the Ukraine electric grid in 2015. That attack, which left 225,000 customers without power, was carried out by Russian government hackers, other U.S. researchers concluded. U.S. government officials have not officially attributed that attack to the Russian government, but some privately say they concur with the private-sector analysis.

“The same Russian group that targeted U.S. [industrial control] systems in 2014 turned out the lights in Ukraine in 2015,” said John Hultquist, who analyzed both incidents while at iSight Partners, a cyber-intelligence firm now owned by FireEye, where he is director of intelligence analysis. Hultquist’s team had dubbed the group Sandworm.

“We believe that Sandworm is tied in some way to the Russian government — whether they’re contractors or actual government officials, we’re not sure,” he said. “We believe they are linked to the security services.”

The Department of Defense (DoD) is the largest single consumer of energy in the United States. It operates over 500,000 buildings and structures with diverse inventory encompassing barracks, commissaries, data centers, office buildings, laboratories, and aircraft maintenance depots. A majority of these bases are largely dependent on a commercial power grid that is vulnerable to disruption from cyber-attacks, aging infrastructure, weather-related events and direct attack. In an effort to reduce energy costs, increase security and improve energy resiliency, DoD has adopted the following energy strategy for fixed installations:

Reduce the demand for traditional energy through conservation and energy efficiencyExpand the supply of renewable energy and other forms of distributed energyImprove the energy resilience of installationsLeverage advanced technology for energy resource efficiencies and increase security advancing control systems cybersecurity capabilities, tools, knowledge and skillsIn line with the above strategy, ESTCP funded Mr. Ryan Faries from Raytheon and his team to demonstrate that microgrids with low cost, large-scale energy storage systems (ESS) have potential to enhance energy security on military installations by facilitating integration of more renewable energy and reducing single-point-of-failure vulnerabilities associated with tradition electric service and back-up generators. This project was conducted at Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) Miramar.

The project involves integrating the advanced Zn/Br Battery and Intelligent Power and Energy Management (IPEM) microgrid control technologies with the infrastructure at MCAS Miramar to provide energy security, islanding capability, and reduced costs. The demonstration connects MCAS Miramar’s Department of Public Works building to the ESS and solar photovoltaic (PV) system, enabling the building to receive power while disconnected, or “islanded”, from the grid.

The goal of the project is to peak shave and island the building circuit for 72 hours under controlled loads. The islanding duration is directly related to 3 main factors: battery energy capacity, PV system generation (solar resource), and load reduction. For demonstrating the islanding capability, the project simulated commercial power grid interruption and powered the building by PV and storage. The monitoring and control system controlled the ESS and collected the power usage data and the data was then analyzed to determine if building loads were met during operational day scenarios.

The project successfully demonstrated the microgrid controller’s ability to integrate and control the ESS, PV system and facility loads while connected to and islanded from the grid. The technology was able to manually increase and decrease the building load by more than 50% during islanding and the ESS was able to store energy during off peak time and discharge about 100kW of energy during peak time for close to 3 hrs. While the demonstration did not meet the success criteria for the islanding duration, the system was able to power the DPW building from the PV array and ESS alone for over 5 hours and at its peak output, the PV array provided over 75% of the power to the facility. Additional details about the demonstration and results can be found in the project’s Final Report which is available on the project webpage.

n this paper we combined a topology-based approach from network science with energy balancing of the power grid to estimate the grid stability under the outage of transmission lines. We have shown that even if the power grid gets fragmented under an outage, many of the resulting fragments may be self-sustainable if the production within the fragments is readjusted. If this compensation is not sufficient or not feasible within the existing margins to cover the total load, the fraction of distributed generation may be increased as compared to the fraction of conventional production. This means, the higher the percentage of renewable energy sources, the larger is the probability that a fragment is self-sustainable if the fluctuations of RES can be controlled. One option for their control may be distributed storage. Therefore RES are not only ecologically beneficial, but may enhance the power grid security. Smart islanding at the level of the transmission system may therefore mitigate the impact of large blackouts.