Russian hackers could have accessed secret US blackout emergency plans

Government officials are reportedly privately worried that Russia accessed secret US plans for restoring power if there is a major blackout across the country.

Last month, it was announced that hackers had breached the software vendor SolarWinds, which works with multiple US government agencies, and had disguised the hack through software updates.

The hack, which also targeted private companies including Microsoft and Amazon, started in March 2020, but was only discovered in December.

Prominent US figures claimed that Russia and its SVR intelligence agency were behind the cyberattack of up to 250 federal agencies and businesses. The country denied the claims, saying that they lacked evidence.

Despite the scale of the hack, US officials have publicly said that they do not believe that classified systems and sensitive communications were breached, according to The Week.

However, The New York Times reported on Saturday that the same officials have now privately said that they are not sure what was taken or accessed during the hack.

The Times reported that some officials are concerned that the SVR managed to access unclassified but delicate information from agencies including the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Officials are concerned that hackers accessed Black Start, which is the detailed plans for how the US would restore power to the country if there was a major outage, during the months-long hack.

If that is the case, then the hackers could have a list of systems that it could target to stop the US from restoring power in the event of an outage, according to the Times.

In 2015, Russia shut off power in Ukraine for more than six hours in the height of winter, after undertaking an attack on three energy distribution companies, in the first known successful cyber attack on a power grid.

The Times also reported that the US now believes that the hack was much broader in scope than originally thought, as it thinks that 250 networks were breached, instead of the original estimation of 18.

Officials said that the hackers managed the attack from inside US servers, while the “early warning” sensors placed by Cyber Command and the National Security Agency failed to detect the breach.

Senator Mark Warner, Virginia Democrat and ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told the Times that the hack “is looking much, much worse than I first feared.”

He added: “The size of it keeps expanding. It’s clear the United States government missed it.”