Jon: Welcome to episode 139 of The Digital Life. A show about our adventures in the world of design and technology. I'm your host Jon Follett, and with me is founder and co-host, Dirk Knemeyer.

Dirk: Greetings, Jon.

Jon: Today Dirk, we're going to talk about something that I find a little frightening, which is the topic is hacking the IoT, and the escalation of cyber-warfare and power outages.

Dirk: That sounds scary Jon.

Jon: Yeah, it is. You referred me to an article that I found very interesting. It was about a power outage in the Ukraine in December where essentially, 80,000 customers were without power. This was in Western Ukraine. The outage was caused by hackers, and this was the 1st incident known where a cyber attack actually caused a massive power outage. This is very much related to our digital lives because now we have all the utilities online.

Of course, I mean electric power is the ultimate foundation of a lot of our civilization. We take it for granted but it's powering pretty everything from heating systems to communication systems. You name it. These are life and death situations when you lose power unexpectedly.

Sometimes, here in the northeast, the US, we have some warning when a power outage might come as a result of a storm, but this sort of cyber attack introduces a level of volatility around power usage that we're certainly not ready for in the US. In a place like Ukraine, I'm sure its devastating, very cold.

The malware used was called black energy, which of course I know very little about malware, but apparently it was delivered via a corrupted Microsoft Word document, which if that's not a reason to switch to Google docs. I don't know what is.

Even more disturbing, there was a 2nd power outage in January at the Kiev airport attributed to this malware as well. This is all setting up a scenario that we've talked a lot about, and security experts, an IoT experts have talked a lot about, but now, it's becoming real life. There was a television show on a couple years ago about the end of society when the power goes out. I can't recall the name of this series. Off the top of my head, but I've watched a couple of episodes and the predictions are dire. Dirk, what do you make of this?

Dirk: Well, we're a long way from that.

Jon: Right. Of course.

Dirk: We're a long way from civilization without any power degrading to a jungle. Cities overrun by animals, but no, your point that things becoming real is right on. For many years now, we've been warned. By we, I mean the tech intelligentsia has been warned that major utilities, such as electric companies are on the grid, are operating with software systems that are corruptible. The theoretical attack of the grid being taken down has been floated. Logically, I nod my head and saw that is possible, but realistically, I went nuh, you know. They're doing things I can't see and I don't understand to prevent that from ever happening.

Well, enter the Ukraine. Certainly, they weren't doing things to prevent that from happening. 80,000 people were without power for an extended period of time. The computers, the systems running this 1 or multiple ... I don't even know electricity, how the process works enough, but I'll call it substations knowing it's wrong, we're fried.

That's what's scary about it. Right? It's taking these things, that were almost bogeyman predictions that while on 1 hand logically, you're like, "OK, yeah. I mean, maybe that could happen," but realistically like in a way, that's never going to transpire. Well, it has transpired. It's not theory anymore. It's practice and real, and something that can impact us.

From a very local perspective, just looking at myself, we had to due to the weather, a few years ago, our home and the homes in the area had no power for about 2 weeks, which was miserable. It was miserable to the point that after a few days, we just drove out of town. We just left.