Furry, cute and the biggest power grid enemy!

However, a new database suggests that the cyber war is not being lost due to increasingly sophisticated hackers or the rise in international terrorism, but because of the humble squirrel. The Cyber Squirrel 1 database maps over 600 incidents worldwide where squirrels have caused power disruption by burrowing into electricity substations and chewing through power cables.

The site quotes John C. Inglis, Former Deputy Director, National Security in the US as saying: “I don't think paralysis (of the electrical grid) is more likely by cyber attack than by natural disaster. And frankly the number one threat experienced to date by the US electrical grid is squirrels.”

The site also states that: ‘The map lists all unclassified Cyber Squirrel Operations that have been released to the public that we have been able to confirm.’ The map also tracks outages by other animals like birds, raccoons and the occasional beaver.

The most recent incident in the database happened on 2nd January in Wagoner, Oklahoma. A squirrel touched grounded wire at an electrical substation, knocking-out power for a portion of the town for five hours.

There were about 137 squirrel induced power outages in 2015, according to Cyber Squirrel’s data. That works out to about one squirrel attack every three days or so. And the site notes that this is probably a conservative estimate.

In an interview with the Washington Post late last year, The American Public Power Association, a group representing municipal electric utilities (which even tracks the blackouts caused by squirrels with its ‘Squirrel Index’), stated that squirrels are the most frequent cause of power outages in the US, although it notes that squirrel induced outages typically affect fewer people than outages caused by storms. ‘Squirrels remain the biggest wildlife nemesis because of their sheer numbers and smarts,’ the story stated.

And this is certainly not a new phenomenon. As far back as 1987 squirrels were causing havoc to power grids when one of the animals took out the power to a NASDAQ computer centre for nearly an hour and a half, stopping an estimated $20m shares from being traded.

As far as the UK is concerned, Cyber Squirrel’s interactive map attributes a number of blackouts to the work of squirrels, including the sabotage of the Christmas lights in Histon, Cambridgeshire, in 2014, to causing a blackout in the village of Milborne Port in Somerset last year – although on this occasion the culprit did not live to tell the tale – a potential down-side of having a habit of chewing on power cables!