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Sorry I haven't had a chance to respond, hectic day. Since vulnerability is no secret now, here is the latest update from the Professor at Dartmouth...

We saw a spike in routing instability at 4:11 PM, the exact moment of the power failure. Our global instability index (GII) peaked around 80 (normal values are between 5 and 50, high-water mark was 240 during the slammer worm)
http://people.ists.dartmouth.edu/~dmcgrath/gii/8.14.03/gii.8.14.png

More significantly, we saw global network reachability drop to about 97.3%, indicating that more than 2.5% of the the Internet was (and continues to be) unreachable. As expected, most of the unreachable networks are in the NY area.
http://people.ists.dartmouth.edu/~dmcgrath/gri/gri.8.14.png

As far as the causes are concerned, nobody knows anything or is willing to say anything at this point. But to me that is not the primary problem. Whether it was terrorism or a lightning strike or a Canadian geese flock decided to commit seppuku on a transformer, the problem as I see it is this:

We are dependent, highly dependent, on a very complex infrastructure of our making (water, electricity, banking, our modern cities) that exhibit hundreds of neuralgic points, making these system non failsafe, non recoverable. Nature would have never have a system evolve like that - would have been too unstable to survive for long. Ours however were consciously designed with other criteria than survivability in mind. Whether it is accidents or planned attacks - as far as I am concerned, terrorism just
exposed what was always a shameful secret of modern society: Our high tech way of life is setting up many accidents waiting to happen, without taking appropriate (in my opinion) precautions. We have been exceedingly lucky in terms of nuclear power, for instance (a half dozen near misses since 1945 in the US alone, the Ukrainians and Byelorussians were not so lucky - two major
accidents (1986, 1958)), but statistically speaking, our luck cannot run forever (especially not with the grid, since our power system is old and decrepit and no major investments have been made to upgrade them - incredible but true). We are due, terror or not, for major accidents/events like these.

I agree. we are an accident waiting for a place to happen. It was terrible to see all those people out in the street. what if that was the plan by terrorists. to get everyone out there and then try to harm them. I would have prefered they stayed put or at least not congregate so many. (together) plus why can't we get up and running./ we are so dependent on the modern tec. that everyplace vertually shut down. In this modern world we better figure out a better system than we have. we have the power and brains to figure it out. go for it

Which "exact moment" of the power failure are you looking at? The sequence of events spread out over more than an hour.

The following information represents a partial sequence of events based upon Reliability Coordinator information available to NERC. It is not clear if these events caused the event or were a consequence of other events. NERC is establishing teams to study the event and will coordinate with FERC, DOE, the industry and others.

Approximate times – Eastern Standard Time – MISO report only
14:06 Chamberlain – Harding 345 kV line tripped – cause not reported
14:32 Hanna – Juniper 345 kV line sagged and tripped
14:41 Star – S. Canton 345 kV line tripped
14:46 Tidd – Canton Ctrl 345 kV line tripped
15:06 Sammis – Star 345 kV line tripped and reclosed
(the preceding lines are located in the vicinity of Cleveland, Ohio)
15:08 Power swings noted in Canada and Eastern United States
15:10 Campbell # 3 tripped ??
15:10 Hampton – Thetford 345 kV line tripped
15:10 Oneida – Majestic 345 kV line tripped
15:11 Avon Unit 9 tripped
15:11 Beaver – Davis Besse
15:11 Midway – Lemoyne – Foster 138(?) kV line tripped
15:11 Perry Unit 1 tripped
15:15 Sammis – Star 345 kV line tripped and reclosed
15:17 Fermi Nuclear tripped
15:17–15:21 Numerous lines in Michigan tripped

The northeastern United States and Canada did not report significant outages prior to 15:11 EST.

http://www.nerc.com/pub_doc/PreliminaryDisturbanceReport.pdf
NERC is a not-for-profit company formed as a result of the Northeast blackout in 1965 to promote the reliability of the bulk electric systems that serve North America. NERC works with all segments of the electric industry as well as customers to “keep the lights on” by developing and encouraging compliance with rules for the reliable operation of the electric grid. NERC membership comprises ten Regional Reliability Councils that account for virtually all the electricity supplied in the United States, Canada, and a portion of Baja California Norte, Mexico. For more information about NERC go to www.nerc.com.

Eaker, thanks for the pint