The Virology of Information Systems in the Power Grid

Malware is a central threat to the power grid. We discuss the issue under different views. First, we show that malware is an effective attack vector for such large systems. In a second step, we justify that defenses are inherently limited to a theoretical limit due to Rice and Turing. Thus, we are led to defenses based on heuristics. We describe some of these, their underlying principle, and their limitations. As a result, we present the general organization of defenses against malware.