Denial of Electricity Service Could Become Next Geopolitical Weapon
Forty-eight years ago, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) unsheathed an energy weapon in the form of an oil embargo, causing shortages in the U.S. and elsewhere that affected global politics and economies long afterward.
Now, as the world increasingly moves to electricity to power everything from communications to transportation to industry, it could be that denial of electricity service becomes the next energy weapon.
We’ve already had a glimpse of what modern geopolitical conflict in an increasingly electrified world might look like. In late 2015, hackers breached the information systems of a Ukrainian electricity distribution company and remotely switched off 30 substations, leaving several hundred thousand people without power for several hours. The incident grabbed headlines only briefly but was touted as the first known cyber hack against electricity assets. Following a similar attack in Kyiv in 2016, then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko accused Russia of waging a cyberwar against Ukraine.