By Mark Pazniokas
Arthur H. House, who has had an up-and-down relationship with Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, stepped down today as chairman of the three-member Public Utilities Regulatory Authority to become the first cybersecurity chief for the state of Connecticut.
Arthur House and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. (CLICK TO ENLARGE) Mark Pazniokas for Ctmirror.org
House, 74, who has held senior posts in Congress, intelligence agencies and the private sector, authored a cybersecurity plan in April for the state’s utilities, warning that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had concluded that “the technology deployed in shutting down parts of the power grid in the Ukraine in December 2015 confirmed that cyber attacks could disable American utilities.”
House said he will be a part of a U.S. delegation next month to the Ukraine to study the attack, the first confirmed instance of hackers shutting down a power grid. Power was restored in a matter of hours, House said, only because workers were able to take physical control of switching equipment.
Months later, the computerized control centers in the Ukraine still were not fully operational. Such an attack might be more difficult to overcome in the U.S., which does not have the same degree of manual backup controls, according to an examination of the incident by Wired.
