The team came back with a mixed answer. While the Ukrainians did not have defenses as sophisticated as many American utility companies, a quaint oddity in Ukrainian systems ultimately saved them from an even greater disaster. It turned out that their electric grid, built by the Soviets, was so antiquated that it wasn’t entirely dependent on computers. “They still had the big, old metal switches that ran the power grid back in the pre-computer age,” Ozment explained, as if admiring the simplicity of an original Ford Model A engine. The investigators reported that Ukrainian engineers got into
...more
