We are more vulnerable than we think we are. In times like these, not only should we push our government to keep us safe, we also must trust in God as our refuge.

From CBN. Electrical substations are in almost every city nationwide. Most house transformers play a huge part in getting power out to you. The larger they are, the more critical.

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“Transformers have been called by many people the ‘Achilles’ heel’ of the electric grid,” explained Joe Weiss, an engineer, and independent consultant.

Transformers take voltage sent by power plants and convert it to a level that can be distributed. Essentially, they keep electricity flowing at safe levels.

While the U.S. electric grid consists of thousands of them, the high voltage carriers make up less than three percent. Even so, they are responsible for transporting 60 to 70 percent of our electricity….

They’re also custom-made in China and experts like Weiss say, while the U.S. is busy securing its networks, China has the ability and opportunity to sabotage the equipment we rely on them to manufacture.

Essentially, they’ve created a “backdoor” into our electric grid….

He said this is no hypothetical warning. The U.S. has already discovered backdoor electronics in a Chinese-made transformer….

There are more than 200 of these large Chinese transformers in our electric grid today. One accounts for 10 percent of the power going to New York City, another supplies 18 to 20 percent of the power going to Las Vegas. Yet, the U.S. is focused on our cyber networks, something China has already proven it can bypass.

“Instead of trying to hack all of these networks and everything else to get in, all they did was put in some hardware that will allow them to send signals. So instead of sending a voltage signal that’s coming from a voltage sensor in that transformer, they can send a signal from Beijing into that piece of equipment,” Weiss explained.

In February of 2021, an arctic blast froze 40 percent of Texas’ electric grid. Millions of homes and businesses were left without power. The outages lasted only days, but more than 100 people died.

Back in 2012, then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warned a room full of business leaders about the scope of a true attack on the U.S. grid.

“The collective result of these kinds of attacks could be a cyber Pearl Harbor. An attack that would cause physical destruction and the loss of life. An attack that would paralyze and shock the nation and create a new profound sense of vulnerability,” Panetta predicted.

Weiss said the question is not if this kind of attack will happen, but rather, will we even know it was a cyber attack.

“What a sophisticated attacker will do and Russia, and China, even Iran, and North Korea now fit into this, they will make a cyber attack look like an equipment malfunction,” Weiss told CBN News….

Experts like Weiss stress that our critical infrastructure is made up of engineering equipment and it will take a partnership between engineers and cybersecurity defenders to truly protect it….

(Excerpt from CBN. Photo Credit: ETA+ on Unsplash)