Texas Scorecard by Tommy Waller September 17, 2021
Houston has a problem.American security experts have long worried about the threat of hackers targeting the U.S. critical infrastructure. American citizens have increasingly begun to see the real-world results, such as the Colonial Pipeline cyber attack, which forced Americans to stand in massive lines for dwindling fuel for days.
But what if foreign adversaries didn’t even need to use hackers to breach our network defenses to cause havoc? What if they were the ones who built the most critical parts of our infrastructure in the first place?
That’s the warning recently raised by a Texas resident in a complaint lodged with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the nation’s federal agency that regulates the “bulk power system.”
According to the documents provided in the complaint, 300 large power transformers, the backbone of the electric grid, were imported into the United States from a Chinese company named JiangSu HuaPeng Transformer Co., Ltd. (JSHP). Copies of bills of lading indicate that at least 20 of these transformers passed through the Port of Houston, Texas, on the way to destinations all over the country. At least one of them, according to the manufacturer, remains in Houston.
Why is this a problem? At least two transformers from JSHP have already been discovered to contain hardware backdoors that could enable Chinese agents to maliciously remote-access and manipulate them. In the summer of 2018, the U.S. government seized a JSHP transformer in the Port of Houston and transported it to Sandia National Laboratories for a comprehensive examination.
“They found hardware that was put into that that had the ability for somebody in China to switch it off,” said Latham Saddler, the former director of intelligence programs at the National Security Council in the last administration.
Yet, despite some efforts of the federal government to address these supply chain vulnerabilities, U.S. utilities just keep importing Chinese transformers. JSHP’s website boasts that their transformers handle 20 percent of the electrical load for Las Vegas and 10 percent of the load for New York City.
But it’s not just JSHP and its transformers. The recent complaint also revealed that U.S. utilities are purchasing a whole host of grid “protection” and “monitoring” products from companies with direct links and even ownership ties to the Chinese Communist government. Chinese law obligates all Chinese corporations to provide assistance whenever the Communist regime’s intelligence agencies demand.
More:
https://texasscorecard.com/commentary/waller-chinese-backdoor-threatens-next-texas-blackout/
