Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

by Andy Greenberg

American engineers, he argued, also have less experience with manual recovery from frequent blackouts than a country like Ukraine. Regional utilities in Ukraine, and even Ukrenergo in Kyiv, are all far more accustomed to blackouts from the usual equipment failures than American utilities. They have fleets of trucks ready to drive out to substations and manually switch the power back on, as Ukrainian utilities did in 2015 when the hackers first hit them. Not every hyper-automated American utility is prepared for that all-hands, on-the-ground manual override. “Taking down the American grid would be harder than Ukraine,” Lee said. “Keeping it down might be easier.”