The action inside the Russian electric grid appears to have been conducted under little-noticed new legal authorities, slipped into the military authorization bill passed by Congress last summer. | 15 June 2019 | The United States is stepping up [illegal] digital incursions into Russia's electric power grid in a warning to President Vladimir V. Putin and a demonstration of how the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively, current and former government officials said. In interviews over the past three months, the officials described the previously unreported deployment of American computer code inside Russia's grid and other targets as a classified companion to more publicly discussed action directed at Moscow's [alleged] disinformation and hacking units around the 2018 midterm elections...Since at least 2012, current and former officials say, the United States has put reconnaissance probes into the control systems of the Russian electric grid.
The Russians are at least as competent as we in doing this sort of hacking, and our grid would be easier as we have an open system more readily accessed. Oh, and security is lousy here. And America is dependent on electricity in ways the Russians can exploit that we never could with them. How far will this go? I wouldn't want to find out.