Lloyd’s of London (the insurance company) and the University of Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies did a study estimating the losses that could result from a cyberattack on the power generation system of the United States.

The study estimates that the cascading failures that could result from a cyberattack on the U.S. power grid could result in losses of over $1 trillion. What triggers the losses in this study?  A spearphishing email.

Could such a thing really happen?  It already did in Ukraine.  In December of 2015 someone used a spearphishing email to seize control of a power grid in Ukraine.  That incident resulted in about 700,000 people losing power.

People ultimately operate systems.  They do this using their system access privileges.  Email is a time-tested way to access people and compromise their system privileges. Spearphishing deceives users into compromising actions. You can fight email deception using SP Guard from Iconix.