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Wang and colleagues at Dalian University of Technology in the Chinese province of Liaoning modelled the US's west-coast grid using publicly available data on how it, and its subnetworks, are connected (Safety Science, DOI: 10.1016/j.ssci.2009.02.002).

Their aim was to examine the potential for cascade failures, where a major power outage in a subnetwork results in power being dumped into an adjacent subnetwork, causing a chain reaction of failures. Where, they wondered, were the weak spots?

Many power plant networks and other essential pieces of America’s infrastructure are owned, operated and protected by corporations.

Some say security of these vital networks should be the sole domain of the federal government because it is a national security concern. Critics say government monitoring of Internet usage -- even for malicious programming -- is a slippery slope toward Big Brother-style surveillance, and private industry can better secure their own networks.

President Barack Obama declared in May that cyber security would be a national priority, creating a cybersecurity czar in the process. But it’s unclear how far that position’s authority will extend once the slot is filled.

In announcing the czar, Obama pledged the government wouldn’t monitor the Internet or mandate security standards to the private sector.

But the Cyber Security Act of 2009 -- currently being debated in Congress -- would give the president authority to shut down certain private networks in the event of a big attack.

The US is mixing its signals and missing an opportunity to help solve the European Cyber-dilemma, which in turn could help untangle the US policy mess.

The threat has reached such a pitch that Barack Obama, the US president, has made it a policy priority. McAfee, the IT security specialist, estimates that 8,000 variants of malicious software are created every day, double the rate seen last year.

Market estimates of how much the US plans to spend in this area vary widely, though the highest predicts it could reach $55bn in the next six years.

Lockheed has been increasing its research and development spending to deal with the threat.

“There is a tremendous burden on the defender,” he says. “We are thinking about how to deal with unknown things: how do you defend against the unknown threat, how do you go from reactive to predictive?”

New systems will need to rely on artificial intelligence to seek out automatically the most subtle changes in data patterns and “take the human out of the loop”.