Is Venezuela's Power Blackout Due To A Cyber Attack?

Kalev Leetaru, Forbes: Could Venezuela's Power Outage Really Be A Cyber Attack?

As Venezuela endured one of its worst blackouts in recent memory this week, the government repeatedly claimed the widespread outage of power, phone and internet was due to a foreign cyberattack attempting to unseat its president. While the reality is that Venezuela’s blackout was most likely due to chronic underfunding of its electrical infrastructure and deferred maintenance, the idea of a foreign nation state manipulating an adversary’s power grid to force a governmental transition is very real.

In 2015 I explored the concept of “cyber first strike” in which governments would increasingly turn to cyberwarfare either on its

own or as part of hybrid warfare to weaken an adversary prior to conventional invasion or to forcibly and deniably effect a transition in a foreign government.

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WNU Editor: Venezuela's power grid has been on the fritz for a long time, and a complete collapse has also been predicted for a long time. This is also not the first time that it has happened .... Power outage plunges most of Venezuela into darkness (Reuters, December 2, 2013). But is this week's power blackout due to a cyber attack? The Venezuelan government has so far shown no evidence to prove this point.

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