December 23, 2015
On the evening of December 23, 2015, the cursor on the grid operator’s computer screen started to move on its own. Hackers had struck the power distributor company Prykarpattyaoblenergo in Ukraine, disabling one circuit breaker after another. It was one of a kind cyberattack on a power grid executed successfully. Soon after, half of the population of Ukraine’s Ivano-Frankivsk region were in the dark without power for up to six hours. While the power was restored in a few hours, it took months for all the control centers to become fully operational again.
The hack on Ukraine’s power grid was a first-of-its-kind attack that sets an ominous precedent for the security of power grids everywhere.