(air whooshing)

- Substations like this one

are in almost every city nationwide.

Most house transformers,

which are a huge part ofgetting power out to you.

The larger they are,

the more critical.

- Transformers have beencalled by many people

the Achilles heel of the electric grid.

- [Caitlin] Transformers takevoltage sent by power plants,

and convert it to a levelthat can be distributed.

Essentially, they keep electricityflowing at safe levels.

While the US electric gridconsists of thousands of them,

the high voltage carriersmake up less than 3%.

Even so, they're responsible

for transporting 60 to70% of our electricity.

- These are 500 ton, 20 feet tall,

multimillion dollar machines.

- [Caitlin] They're alsocustom made in China,

and experts like Joe Weiss say

while the US is busysecuring its networks,

China has the ability and opportunity

to sabotage the equipment werely on them to manufacture,

essentially creating a backdoor into our electric grid.

- What they have is the ability today.

They have their fingeron that trigger today

that they can take over that transformer,

and everything that transformer supplies,

coming in or going out.

It's a very big deal.

[Caitlin] Weiss, an engineer

and independent consultant

says this is no hypothetical warning.

The US has already discoveredbackdoor electronics

in a Chinese made transformer.

It was that discovery thatled, then, President Trump

to sign an executive order in May of 2020,

banning the acquisition,importation, transfer,

or installation of any bulk power systems

from foreign adversaries.

The discovery also led to something

that's never happened before.

- The next large transformer from China

that arrived at the port of Houston

was intercepted by theUS Department of Energy,

and taken to the SandiaNational Laboratory.

Remember, this is a 500 ton,

multi-million dollar machine.

So there was a utility missing.

[Caitlin] Llewellyn King is a journalist

who's been covering theenergy field for decades.

When he approached theDepartment of Energy

about the missing transformer,

he was met with a veil of silence.

- No comment is, to me,very much a comment.

It says if there's smokethen there must be fire.

- So, not only do our domestic utilities

not know what's being found,

our closest allies, who alsohave Chinese made transformers,

do not know what has been found.

[Caitlin] There are more than 200

of these large Chinese transformers

in our electric grid today.

One accounts for 10% of thepower going to New York City.

Another supplies 18 to 20% ofthe power going to Las Vegas.

And yet, the US is focusedon our cyber networks,

something China has alreadyproven it can bypass.

- Instead of trying tohack all of these networks,

and everything else to try 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 voltagesensor in that transformer,

they can send a signal from Beijing

into that piece of equipment.

- [Caitlin] In November of 2020,

an Arctic blast froze 40%of the Texas electric grid.

Millions of homes and businesseswere left without power.

The outages lasted only days,

and yet more than a hundred people died.

Back in 2012, then Secretaryof Defense, Leon Panetta,

warned a room full of business leaders

about the scope of a trueattack on the US grid.

- The collective resultof these kinds of attacks

could be a cyber Pearl Harbor,

an attack that would causephysical destruction,

and the loss of life.

An attack that would paralyzeand shock the nation,

and create a new profoundsense of vulnerability.

- [Caitlin] Weiss says the question is not

if this kind of attack will happen,

but rather, will we evenknow it was a cyber attack?

- What a sophisticated attacker will do,

and Russia and China,

even Iran and North Korea now fit in this,

they will make a cyber attack

look like an equipment malfunction.

- [Caitlin] He points to Stuxnet,

the US cyber attack that took out 1/5

of Iran's nuclear centrifuges.

- For a year, an entire year,

the centrifuges were being destroyed.

The people inside could hearthose centrifuges screaming.

They never even thoughtthat cyber was the problem.

They simply viewed it asa systemic design flaw.

- [Caitlin] Experts like Weiss,

stress that our critical infrastructure

is made up of engineering equipment,

and it will take apartnership between engineers,

and cybersecurity defendersto truly protect it.

- Our workforce is nottrained to address this.

The people that understand the equipment

have no training in cyber security.

The people who understand cyber security

are not trained to understandhow an electric grid

or a pipeline or anything else works.

- [Caitlin] This backdoorthreat from our adversaries

applies to all of ourcritical infrastructure,

not just the grid.

- Much of that same equipment

is used in all other industries.

So it's a weak spot forthe electric industry.

It's just as much a weak spotfor every other industry.

- The parts that make upthis critical infrastructure

are also old,

and as we've seen in Texas,

susceptible to extreme weather events.

So whether it's maliciousor unintentional,

if these systems go down,

it will be months, if not years,

before we get them back,

making us truly vulnerable.

Caitlin Burke, CBN News,