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Crazy conspiracy theory: the Chinese and/or Russians have most likely already compromised our power grid and other infrastructure control systems and are waging
by perlin 9y ago
Crazy conspiracy theory: the Chinese and/or Russians have most likely already compromised our power grid and other infrastructure control systems and are waging covert economical war by disrupting important services.
- acchow 9y agoThat's a wild theory, but I can't help feeling this way either...
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- cylinder 9y agoThe biggest part of that economic war would be letting everyone know the grid has been compromised, not the actual outage, there's no advantage to keeping it secret.
- adventured 9y agoThere's a benefit to keeping it out of public channels if it's a warning rather than an economic war.
- drspacemonkey 9y agoI'd argue that taking out the power in three major economic centers at the same time would be the opposite of keeping it secret. But I completely agree with your reasoning.
- aaronblohowiak 9y agoCapability demonstration
- galdosdi 9y agoBut the downside to making it public is you'll galvanize the victim nation to start taking computer security more seriously, and your window of opportunity will start to close. It would make sense to try to "boil the frog" and gradually and slowly increase the frequency and severity so that by the time you "find" the threshold that snaps the victim nation out of their slumber, you've gotten away with a lot of damage cumulatively.
- api 9y agoIt's a valid hypothesis and not crazy at all. If this were random I'd expect totally random cities, not the three most economically significant. It might not be covert economic warfare, but more of a covert demonstration whose audience is intended to be the US government. "We have lots of dangerous 0-days, and there's a lot more where these came from." In that case public credit would never be claimed. It reminds me of how GitHub kept getting DDOSed for no reason. Turns out GitHub was a popular demo target for vendors of DDOS botnets to show their power. Edit: could be exactly that... a demo of wares by a black market vendor of 0-days for a potential buyer. Edit #1: a non-malicious explanation might be a vendor pushing out a bad software update to something.
- tlrobinson 9y ago"If this were random I'd expect totally random cities, not the three most economically significant." I would be very surprised if there weren't at least 3 power outages in random cities on a daily basis, you just don't hear about it until it's 3 major cities.
- api 9y agoThat is also possible. I can't find any comprehensive history of blackouts anywhere so it's hard to check probabilities.
- tyingq 9y agoThere's this: http://insideenergy.org/2014/08/18/data-explore-15-years-of-power-outages/ http://insideenergy.org/2014/08/18/data-explore-15-years-of-... Which includes a link to this Google spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AdxhulfM9jeqviIZihuODqk7HoS1kRUlM_afIKXAjXQ/edit https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AdxhulfM9jeqviIZihuO...
- api 9y agoGreat find. At a glance it looks like 1-2 dozen per month, so a coincidence is definitely plausible. Have to wait and see.
- pps43 9y agoNot likely because of Hanlon's razor: "don't attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
- tantalor 9y agoThis takes precedence: "Once is an accident. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is an enemy action" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moscow_rules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moscow_rules
- nefitty 9y agoThe rule you quoted is not on the list there.
- v64 9y agoI think you meant to link to this [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfinger_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfinger_(novel)
- pps43 9y agoLike with birthday paradox, denominator is important. Considering how many large cities and days there are, this might not be an unusual coincidence.
- yequalsx 9y agoHanlon's Razor is not an established law of reasoning or of philosophy. Quoting it is not a valid counter argument without additional reasoning given.
- IIIIIIIIIIII 9y agoThat reminds me of this cartoon: http://i.imgur.com/aI80YDO.jpg http://i.imgur.com/aI80YDO.jpg
- exolymph 9y ago
- drspacemonkey 9y agoCan it be called crazy if exactly that has happened in the recent past? Russia did it to the Ukraine just a few months ago.
- groby_b 9y agoCrazy reality here: SF was caused by a substation fire. http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/04/21/power-outage-shuts-down-barts-montgomery-station/ http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/04/21/power-outage-shu...
- rdiddly 9y agoA substation fire isn't a root cause. What caused the fire? Possibilities I know of would mostly require failure of safety measures, but would include such things as hapless squirrels & birds, problems elsewhere in the system, and yes even remote operation of substation equipment by humans in dangerous ways. (Including both incompetence and malice, though in the latter case you would have to assume the safety measures didn't fail but were overridden.) Addendum: I'm not coming out full force in favor of a conspiracy theory, I'm coming out full force in favor of keeping an open mind, not getting overly comfortable in one's beliefs, and remembering one knows a lot less than one thinks one knows.
- perlin 9y agoIt'd be pretty easy to trigger a substation fire by feeding lower values into the voltage sensors than how much was actually flowing. Similar to how Stuxnet faked the values it was overriding so that everything seemed normal when in reality the centrifuges were spinning out of control. As another commenter pointed out, it's just keeping an open mind...
- Caveman_Coder 9y agoCould you explain this further? I'm not sure how innacurate voltage readings would cause a fire...
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoI believe the idea is, you make the monitoring values read too low (lower than the actual voltage in the wires), so the automatic control system adjusts by making the voltage higher. If you can get it to make the real voltage higher than the equipment can safely handle, you may get a fire.
- gdubs 9y agoThis recent USA Today article claims our grid is attacked every three to four days: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/03/24/power-grid-physical-and-cyber-attacks-concern-security-experts/24892471/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/03/24/power-grid-ph... As mentioned in another comment, Ted Koppel's book "Lights Out" is a really fascinating read on the threat.