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Not really new news---but it seems the public is inured to such things--I bet that would change in a hurry...if the lights went off.
Brief quote:
"The Trump administration accused Russia on Thursday of engineering a series of cyberattacks that targeted American and European nuclear power plants and water and electric systems, and could have sabotaged or shut power plants off at will.
and
“We now have evidence they’re sitting on the machines, connected to industrial control infrastructure, that allow them to effectively turn the power off or effect sabotage,” said Eric Chien, a security technology director at Symantec, a digital security firm.
“From what we can see, they were there. They have the ability to shut the power off. All that’s missing is some political motivation,” Mr. Chien said."
This is very worrisome and I wish it was bigger news. But with all the corruption and dysfunction in the news, this gets little publicity.
It's entirely possible for the Russians to do serious damage to us by blowing up nuclear power plants and disrupting entire cities. They are just waiting for the right time to do so... Let's hope the sanctions don't put them over the edge.
The question now is, what are WE doing to reconfigure/reengineer the controls so the Russians are shut out and neutralized?
We are so stupid to have major infrastructure like that accessible on the internet. That's just pure idiocy. A new interconnected network needs to be laid for this and a brand new protocol developed that it communicates on with no possibility of it being accessed by the public internet.
We are so stupid to have major infrastructure like that accessible on the internet. That's just pure idiocy. A new interconnected network needs to be laid for this and a brand new protocol developed that it communicates on with no possibility of it being accessed by the public internet.
There are a lot of issues here that explain our vulnerability much less the slow response to gear us up to protect & defend our power grid & systems.
As I heard it explained last night, one major part of the problem is rooted in the fact that we have a conglomeration of privately owned & publicly owned power systems (but non-governmental in nature) comprising our power grid. As such, they do not work together or operate their administrative or grid facility systems in lockstep or in the same way. And many of them have not kept up with technological advances to update so as to get the best & newest measures in place for their operating system software.
The new warning that was just issued by the Department of Homeland Security notes that Russian trolls have infiltrated far enough into the power companies & their controls such that power plants can be turned off at will now by direction of the hackers who are operating at the behest of Putin's Russian government.
To me, this is serious enough that I'm astounded that this is not front page news, so to speak!
It will be front page news when & if the hackers turn off the lights.
Our power grid is a weak link, and vulnerable, not only to cyber attacks, but physical attacks that could disable large areas. Metro areas are especially at risk, as people rely on electrical power for almost everything, don't have back ups, and are less self sufficient. I am surprised, but grateful that terrorists haven't been successful in taking down large portions of our generation, or distribution.
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At most, they should be connected to an Intranet, and multiple redundant ones besides: harder to knock out if it can turn to lots of different systems instead of depending on just one system. Better yet, allow a flipswitch that lets us revert back to 20th century methods besides. It may not be the perfect analogy, but I think of it in terms of radio. Transistors are vulnerable to EMPs from nuclear detonations - tubes are not (be they pre-Cold War technology). Yeah, it'll naturally be inconvenient to switch back to "Greatest Generation" tech, but at least we won't be back in the Napoleonic Era at best. Now if we mass-produce solar panels for national energy security purposes, that will make reestablishing manufacturing after such a "technocalypse" even more robust*.
*Not only will it prevent a nation of 320 million or more from having to use greenhouse gas emitting fuels to get back to the previous level, it also overcomes the tyranny of geography (having to await coal, oil, etc. supplies on the "local-local-local" level in the first place).
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Cyberattacks...
