Plum Island, N.Y. – The team of grid operators had spent days restoring power when a digital strike took out one of two operational utility stations. The other utility was also under attack.

A month had passed since all power in the region was taken down by a devastating cyberattack. It had been a grueling six days restoring power across two electrical utilities and to the building deemed a critical national asset by the Secretary of Energy.

The cyber strike hadn’t forced the team back to zero, but it wasn’t far from it.

Just moments ago, the two electric utilities had been working in concert, delivering reliable and redundant power to the critical asset. Now one utility was down for the count and the other was under attack.

The grid operators’ only chance to restore power to the asset would be to route it, substation by substation, from the utility that was still operating. The team of cybersecurity researchers assisting the grid operators would have to use every piece of technology and know-how they had to ensure that utility stayed powered up, trustworthy and malware-free.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency exercise, which took place from Nov. 1 to Nov. 7, was fictional, but it was designed to mimic all the hurdles and uncertainty of a real-world cyberattack that took out power across the nation for weeks on end–a scenario known as a “black start.”

To add realism, the exercise took place on Plum Island, a federal research facility off the north fork of Long Island, where DARPA researchers were able to segregate a portion of the island on its own electric grid.

Over the course of the seven-day exercise, more than 100 people gathered on the island, filling every necessary role to mimic an actual black start.

At the center of the exercise was a team of grid operators from electric utilities across the nation, which was in charge of restoring and sustaining power.

At its most basic level, their job involved creating initial power transmissions at both utilities using a diesel generator, then building cyber-secure “crank paths” through a series of electric substations that would increase the transmissions’ voltage until they were capable of powering the two utilities and delivering redundant power to the exercise’s critical asset.

Meanwhile, another team of DARPA-funded cyber researchers from seven different industry groups used custom built technology to keep the grid operators’ efforts protected from cyber adversaries.

A third DARPA-funded team took the role of the cyber adversaries, throwing a wrench into the good guys’ efforts every time they seemed to be getting ahead.

“We have a bunch of things that try to make this as painful as possible for everyone,” project leader Walter Weiss told reporters on a rainy Tuesday, the sixth day of the exercise. “How do you actually keep the smartest people in the world busy for a week? That takes effort.”

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