Exelon, a utility name that is the largest operator of nuclear plants in the U.S., felt the sting too.

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It took Schaeffer only five months to analyze the setup and write code that would let him, from his laptop, tell the Scada system to open and close enough breakers to bring down the mock utility--without letting the legitimate operator see what was going on.

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Investors in the so-called public-private partnership include Russian Railways, national power utility Unified Energy System and state-controlled pipeline operator Transneft.

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The investigation into last year's North American blackout revealed that during the precious minutes following the first outages in Ohio, when action might have been taken to prevent the blackout spreading, the local utility's managers had to ask the regional system operator by phone what was happening on their own wires.

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With all three of its reactors now off-line, the operator has been unable to sell electricity to its utility customers.

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