Grid Resiliency: It Must Be A Bottoms Up Approach

When we talk about securing the electric grid, the conversation usually focuses on preventing outages or protecting the biggest, most visible assets like large power plants, transmission lines, and control centers. But operators know the harder problem is not knocking the grid down; it’s bringing it back up. Grid recovery depends on a fragile chain of smaller substations, control systems, communications links, and auxiliary components that must come online in a precise sequence. Increasingly, those overlooked components are now becoming the real targets. Rob Lee, co-founder and CEO of Dragos, joins Matt Calligan to explain how adversaries think about recovery denial, why attacking the smallest parts of the grid can stop the biggest ones from ever coming back online, and what it means that state actors are now transferring operational knowledge to non-state actors who are already causing physical process