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Protecting the Nation's Power Grid

Hanover, New Hampshire - September 7, 2005

Worms and viruses can wreak havoc on personal computers or business networks, but imagine what would happen if a virus infected the nation's power grid?

((3:42:23 - Sean Smith/Asst. Professor Computer Science - What if the next worm did something that brought down power in one quadrant of the United States for two weeks? That's a serious issue," says Sean Smith, a computer science professor at Dartmouth College.

Smith is part of a new $7 million Cyber Trust Center created by the National Science Foundation. The center's goal is to improve the nation's power grid cyber-infrastructure by making it more secure and reliable from hackers and possible blackouts.

"It's all about information and computing, moving around and controlling the devices that keep this thing stable and running."

Smith will lead a team that will look at computer hardware devices such as chips, boards, and computing bases and figure out how to make them safe and effective.

"A lot of the devices that are running the grid don't have people sitting in front of them to update them and living in a place where they can't go be updated."

Smith hopes his group can come up with a way to create software that could automatically update computers to protect themselves. The nation's grid controls infrastructure like hospitals, banking and finance... and in the face of a cyber attack, Smith says the center should know how to react so that it's not "lights out" on the power grid.

Nicole Oliverio - Channel 3 News