Former White House Advisor: Hackers Didn't Cause 2003 Blackout

Cyber security consultant Paul Kurtz threw some cold water this week on a report that Chinese hackers caused the massive 2003 northeastern U.S. blackout. He worked for the White House at the time of the outage.

Careful examination of this photo reveals the "trees" are actually Chinese hackers.
Courtesy NERCLast month the National Journal cited two computer security professionals, who in turn cited unnamed U.S. intelligence officials, in reporting that China's People's Liberation Army may have cracked the computers controlling the U.S. power grid to trigger the cascading blackout that cut off electricity to 50 million people in eight states and a Canadian province.

On Wednesday, Kurtz told NPR host Diane Rehm, of WAMU, that there's no truth to the claim.

At least in the case of the blackout in 2003, at that time I was the White House special assistant to the president on critical infrastructure, and one of the first things I thought of was: Was this a cyber attack, and if it was a cyber attack, from where?

But the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Energy undertook an investigation, and one of the things we really focused on was the digital records. And there's nothing there that says that China was behind this. There's nothing to say that there was code inserted into any one of the systems.

It's a matter of public record that it's, if you will, Murphy's Law. This was poor maintenance among the electrical power providers, removing tree limbs and all those kind of things.

That is not to say, though, that our critical infrastructure, the power grid, oil and gas networks, banking and financial networks are not being mapped, today, by in fact China. But I think 2003, it's incorrect to attribute the 2003 blackout to China.

See Also:

• Did Hackers Cause the 2003 Northeast Blackout? Umm, No
• No Chinese Hackers Found in Florida Outage Either