The Far Right Domestic Extremist Threat to the Power Grid

As noted in article in Homeland Security Today, a man with a “neo-Nazi” ideology as well as anti-government and other extremist sentiments was arrested earlier this month for allegedly planning to attack an electrical substation. The article uses the recent case to discuss other plots that involved attacks on the power grid. In addition to several actual plots, it notes that the White Resistant Manual, which is describes as being a white supremacist handbook similar to The Anarchist Handbook, contains a sabotage section that includes electrical power generation and distribution. The article goes on to describe actual attacks, one of the most infamous of which was the April 2018 attack on a transmission substation in California. Noting that substations and other parts of the electric grid have many vulnerabilities, the article concludes with a series of suspicious behaviors operators should watch for. Read the article in Homeland Security Today.