Quote:President Biden is putting the final details on a plan to encourage American electric utilities to strengthen their cybersecurity protections against hackers in the next 100 days, amid increasing cyberattacks.
 
The White House push to boost electrical grid security comes in the wake of a report that a full quarter of the 1,500 utilities across North America were infected with the SolarWinds malware, now formally attributed to Russian state actors. There was no evidence the so called “back door” was used by the threat actors to breach any electrical grids, according to The Intercept, which added that it’s impossible to know how deep these attacks went into the industrial control systems (ICS). And meanwhile, recent publicized attacks on the Kansas and Florida water utilities have raised alarm bells.
 
Against this backdrop, a six-page draft of the plan was created by the National Security Council and described to Bloomberg News, which reported that the government will offer incentives to utilities to install monitoring software to spot hackers and then report any suspicious activity to the federal government to coordinate a response.
 
The plan also asks utilities to identify sites which are particularly sensitive to attack and would have the most catastrophic impact, Bloomberg reported. It will also give the Energy Department the ability to expand its current classified program to flag power-grid vulnerabilities which could be exploited by attackers.