Electric Power Grid Indications and Warning Tool
September 2012
David Koester, The MITRE Corporation
Michael Cohen, The MITRE Corporation
ABSTRACT
The Electric Power grid makes an attractive target because it is the foundational critical infrastructure that
underlies all others. A successful attack on the power grid causing a wide-area long-term outage would have significant
national security, economic, and public health and safety consequences. Power grid outages could even cause additional
cascading failures in other critical infrastructures due to the high dependency on electrical power. Hence, it is imperative that
public and private authorities receive Indications and Warnings (I&W) when such attacks are in the early operational phases in
order to mitigate their consequences. Towards that end, we have developed a prototype Electric Power I&W tool to provide near
real-time I&W to alert private and public sector authorities when the likely causes of outage events are malicious activity. We have developed new business intelligence-style metrics to quantify the consequences of power system outages and we have developed
techniques to identify multiple, cotemporaneous attacks. We demonstrate the ability to minimize false alarms due to severe
weather. Similar techniques can be employed to minimize false alarms caused by high temperatures and wind or geomagnetic
storms. For this capability to be used in the private and public sectors, a commercialized product based on this research would
need be developed that would be: (1) part of a larger grid management capability or (2) part of state and metropolitan area
fusion centers' capabilities where potential attacks on multiple critical infrastructure components are monitored continually.
Additional Search Keywords
electric power grid, homeland security warning tools, electric outages, power resources, electric grid Indication & Warning tool, I&W
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