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Morgan has also noticed a shift in recent incidents. But the attacks like the ones on the North Carolina substations are “a different ballgame,” FERC Commissioner Mark Christie said at the agency’s December meeting, calling them “sophisticated.” In some parts of the country, for instance, hunting season has always brought an uptick in troublemakers taking potshots at insulators and other equipment. Saboteurs have been taking aim at this infrastructure for decades. Granger Morgan, a professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University who chaired three National Academy of Sciences reports on the power grid for the federal government. “It’s inherently vulnerable, because it’s constructed in such a way that if one part of it can be destroyed or impaired it can have a very significant impact on other larger parts of it very quickly,” says Dr. power grid-which spans more than 7,300 power plants, 55,000 transmission substations and 160,000 miles of high-voltage power lines-a particularly soft target for determined attackers. Read More: The United States of Political Violence. “You have the ability now to look at selected areas of the country and knock those out depending on how they are interconnected, and that information of where those lines and those substations are is all available to anybody on the Internet.” The effectiveness of the attack in Moore County is likely to lead more bad actors or extremist groups to “learn more information about the infrastructure itself and how it operates” online in order to carry out similar attacks, Wellinghoff adds. “They wanted to knock out a particular area of that county…and were able to select the substation that would knock out that entire line.” Whoever perpetrated the attack in North Carolina “were fairly sophisticated,” Wellinghoff says. Jon Wellinghoff, who served as chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) from 2009 to 2013, says the incident in Moore County was the most sophisticated he had seen since a 2013 attack on the Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s substation near San Jose, Calif., in which multiple gunmen fired on the facility and caused $15 million in damages.

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“I’m certain that the North Carolina attackers have insider knowledge on substations and critical energy infrastructure and knew how to attack, undetected,” says Harrell, noting they knew where to access sites and what to shoot at-and that no security would be in place. Several experts and former officials told TIME they believed that attack was committed by someone who knew what they were doing. Law enforcement officials, who have offered up to $75,000 for anyone who can provide information that would lead to the arrest of those responsible, have said that the perpetrators took aim at the substations with firearms with the intention to cause widespread outages. A month later, despite an ongoing FBI investigation continues, no one has been arrested for acts of sabotage that left more than 45,000 people without power amid frigid temperatures. 3 attack on two power stations in Moore County, N.C.

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The case that most concerns authorities is the Dec. Yet many others remain mysterious to law enforcement and federal regulators. In each of the last three years, law enforcement has foiled plots by right-wing extremists designed to sow chaos by attacking America’s electrical infrastructure.

Violent conspiracies focused on targeting and destroying energy infrastructure have become one of the top themes on extremist social-media platforms and messaging apps. But the surge has alarmed federal officials and security analysts, who warned last year of “credible, specific plans” by violent domestic groups to attack the power grid.

And in the most high-profile incident, intruders breached the gates and opened fire on two Duke Energy substations in Moore County, N.C., in early December, damaging equipment in what local authorities called a “targeted” attack that cut off the power for more than 45,000 people. In one attack on Thanksgiving, two intruders cut through the fencing around a substation in Clackamas County, Ore., and “used firearms to shoot up and disable numerous pieces of equipment and cause significant damage,” according to an incident report. The tally includes at least half a dozen at Duke Energy facilities in Florida and at least six others on electrical substations in the Pacific Northwest in November and December.

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