Power grid peril

Where would we be without electricity? Nowhere. While computers today are able to connect to the web via WiFi, at the end of the day the battery needs to be charged with--you get it, electricity. But new cybersecurity standards proposed by the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) are not broad enough and fail to cover a number of interdependent assents, according to a group of experts. They testified in Congress recently that the standards give electric utility owners, operators and users too much leeway in implementing the prescribed controls. Joseph Weiss, managing partner of Applied Control Solutions, testified that the growing interconnectedness of control systems with other networked computing systems is happening without a appreciating the security risk resulting from such connectivity.

For more on the juice that runs your systems:
- see this ComputerWorld article