Darpa Drills Show Potential Devastation of Hack on Power Grid

Five times over three years, a desperate scenario has played out on Plum Island, an isolated spit of land just off the northeastern tip of New York’s Long Island. A large part of the power grid has gone down, leaving the population in the dark and critical facilities such as hospitals growing desperate. A team of utility operators and cybersecurity experts scrambles to get the grid back up, while hackers try to keep it down.

Each emergency was a drill held by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the Pentagon’s moonshot research arm. Its goal was to ...