DNC emails – had been found on one of their systems . Vermont Governor , Peter Shumlin issued a statement accusing Vladimir Putin of attempting to hack Vermont ’ s electrical grid , and many others follow suit . And there appears to be a good chance that the malicious code found on a Burlington Electric laptop is evidence of a state sponsored cyberattack . Following the initial news cycle , some pundits dismissed the finding as a non-story . It ’ s true , the laptop was “ not connected to the power grid systems ” , and there is no proof yet that the Russians were involved . It ’ s also true that the Russian built Grizzly Steppe hacking code is widely available on the dark internet , and anyone could have put it on that laptop . According to Ukrainian energy provider Ukrenergo , a second major outage on December 17 , 2016 , may have been caused by a similar cyber-attack . Attacks on critical infrastructure typically require a long , slow , low-profile campaign , beginning with subtle , difficult to detect maneuvers , like slipping malware on laptop computers . Two years prior to the first Ukraine incident , hackers began attempting to acquireAttack.Databreachlegitimate login credentials by hackingAttack.Databreachnon-operational systems at Ukrainian utilities – systems very much like Burlington Electric ’ s laptop . According to a Booz Allen analysis , spear-phishing emails containing weaponized Microsoft Word , Excel , and PowerPoint files , exactly the type of files typically found on laptop computers , were sent toAttack.PhishingUkraine electric utility employees as early as May 2014 . Once legitimate login credentials were discovered through these seemingly minor attacks on non-operational systems , the hackers used them to access critical Industrial Control Systems ( ICS ) in order to shutoff breakers , shutdown uninterrupted power supplies ( UPS ) , destroy Human Machine Interface ( HMI ) systems , and destroy Serial-to-Ethernet devices at substations .