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So maybe I'm a little paranoid, but does anyone else think its odd that 911 services are going down AND we had that major transformer explode in NYC? All in the

So maybe I'm a little paranoid, but does anyone else think its odd that 911 services are going down AND we had that major transformer explode in NYC? All in the course of a matter of hours? I'm not saying its anyone one in particular but it is smart to test your weapons before having to rely on them. And its a pretty well established fact that the US power system security is lacking. Maybe i'm just being paranoid but I'm a security engineer. I'm supposed to be.

matheweis 8y ago
I’m going with Hanlon’s Razor on this. If you wanted to test your cyber weapons, I’d imagine you wouldn’t want to draw too much attention to yourself by testing them simultaneously. On the other hand, years of cost cutting and other “efficiency” measures can easily explain both the problems with the power grid as well as the 911 networks.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Indeed. Degrade infrastructure overnight and it's a terrorist attack. Degrade it over 20 years and it's "small government".
  - Proven 8y ago
    Yeah small government destroys infrastructure because networks and roads are way too sophisticated for private companies to design, build and operate.
  - Gravityloss 8y ago
    You can affect this as a foreign power. Pay some think tank to produce material for (so called) media outlets.
    - johnchristopher 8y ago
      I am not a US citizen and not living in the US but I can't recall hearing a foreign official or non-official supporting a reduced US government. US local politicians are vocals enough about it.
      - pjc50 8y ago
        Obviously they wouldn't do so under their own names, but through Macedonian troll factories, opaquely funded think tanks, Russia Today interviews, twitter bots, and so on.
      - Gravityloss 8y ago
        Oh, that would be doing it wrong. Of course it would be presented as locally written journalism, local experts or "concerned citizens" etc. I'm not saying it's happening, but I certainly see the potential profitability in it.
      - mattnewton 8y ago
        I absolutely agree this is a home grown phenomenon but there is some evidence that Russia funneled money to Republicans with these beliefs through the NRA. This is just one example we happen to know about because people are looking under every rock after the 2016 election. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/timeline-of-russian-plot-to-infiltrate-nra-and-gop/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/timeline-of-russian-plot-to-inf...
        pjc50 8y ago
        The NRA is a great example of this; its president is Oliver North, famously involved in a plot to sell weapons to one enemy of America to illegally support a terrorist organisation in another. I'm sure such an upstanding person has America's best interests at heart. /s
- onetimemanytime 8y ago
  >>If you wanted to test your cyber weapons, I’d imagine you wouldn’t want to draw too much attention to yourself by testing them simultaneously. Unless you wanted to send a message about "we can do this too" ...or a response. Lots of things we don't know but a few people in NSA/CIA might know what this is about--if it was done by a foreign power. But also things happen by random chance.
- starbeast 8y ago
  I have said this before, but Hanlon's razor is good for politeness, but not very good for assessing what people are actually up to, as people regularly disguise maliciousness as incompetence and find it fun to do so, especially in politics and other power games. One of the many tricks to power is pleading powerlessness on the things you actually planned ahead of time while claiming full responsibility for things that are accidental.
  - shawnz 8y ago
    But what you are describing is already part of the premise of Hanlon's razor. It's true you can't always distinguish maliciousness and incompetence, but incompetence is easier to achieve and so occurs more frequently. That's why any given instance like this is more likely to be incompetence than malice. It's possible this could be some secret plot disguised as incompetence, but it's also totally reasonable for an event like this to happen from incompetence alone, and I don't think it would surprise anyone if that were the case. So we ought to focus on the reality that this kind of outage is totally possible due to incompetence and implement measures to prevent that.
    - starbeast 8y ago
      Not only can you not always distinguish them from each other, but they are very far from being mutually exclusive. Which is somewhere else that Hanlon's razor falls down. It sets them up as being options to choose between, which is obviously a very bad model. To be honest, when I first heard Hanlon's razor, I immediately wondered what nefarious stuff Hanlon had been up to that he wanted to deflect attention away from. Is a bit like the old aphorism 'You can't cheat an honest man', which is of most use to con artists trying to put honest people at ease before then cheating them. edit - also you are misrepresenting Hanlon's razor. It is not an argument that says that stupidity is merely more likely, rather it says - "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".
- westpfelia 8y ago
  Well an argument to this could be that we cant tell its an attack. In a recent report on US weapon systems it was found that even a simple network scan could crash a system. "Operators reported that they did not suspect a cyber attack because unexplained crashes were normal for the system." That exerpt comes from this report which was released two months ago. https://www.gao.gov/assets/700/694913.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/700/694913.pdf We're no longer in a time when Occams razor tells us that the giant radio active spike over the ocean is a nuclear weapons test. Now Occams razor tells us that every crash is simply due to bad hardware or (and sometimes both) a lack of funding.
  - Alex_Fragd 8y ago
    >unexplained crashes were normal for the system this only makes me more concerned
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      It shouldn't really. If they're really common then everyone already knows how to deal with things when the system crashes, it isn't a big deal. What you need to worry about is what happens when the system that has never crashed and that everyone depends on and no one understands goes down.
  - magduf 8y ago
    All you have to do is go look at various bridges across the US, and roads in urban areas too. The simple fact is that the US absolutely refuses to maintain or repair infrastructure. So we have bridges rusting apart and even collapsing sometimes with vehicles on them. With a national attitude like that, random unexplained crashes of other critical systems shouldn't be a surprise.
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  > If you wanted to test your cyber weapons, I’d imagine you wouldn’t want to draw too much attention to yourself by testing them simultaneously. True, but that assumes this would be a test rather than an actual attack. There are motives where substantial but non-crippling disruption could be the goal.
  - Moru 8y ago
    You don't test your cyber weapons so anyone notices. It's giving away that you have a weapon and gives your enemy time to adapt and protect themselves. Mabe it's someone tired of the boss not listening to the complaints of potentially crippling bugs in the security and is now doing a presentation of what would happen to society if he does not get to fix the bug? Or a provider of DDOS-protection that is running their own DDOS botnet for kicks? Mirai comes to mind here... :-)
    - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
      > You don't test your cyber weapons so anyone notices. Yes, I know. I'm saying it's not impossible that this is an actual attack, not a test.
- samstave 8y ago
  If you recall the stuxnet attack against iran, it was israel who went ahead and deployed the attack against the wishes of the nsa - as they were chomping at the bit to test it. Also, they made their tracks known with Torrah quotes in the code.
cobookman 8y ago
Unless you knew the us government would know you did it. And this was to show them just how much you've compromised the us...and are making it known.
elihu 8y ago
If I were a hostile country and wanted to create a bit of chaos, I imagine I would try to do it at the most inconvenient time possible. Like, say, when the markets are unusually volatile and the president has been doing things that put everyone on edge, like fire his defense secretary and shut down the government. Of course, it's also quite likely that this is just a coincidence and the transformer and network outage were just ordinary accidents.
- mistermann 8y ago
  Hostile entity might be a better term considering the times we live in.
- hopler 8y ago
  The US has been volatile for 2 years running. Cherrypicking examples to create the appearance of rare coincidence is bad stats.
  - yebyen 8y ago
    But... we are in the middle of a government shutdown, aren't we? And the stock market is also going bonkers just this last few days. Those are facts, and today this is another one. That's not cherry picking. That's not comprehensive or exhaustive fact-checking either. But they are sure facts!
- sgc 8y ago
  Or it might be directly related to furloughs somewhere leading to insufficient network maintenance.
petee 8y ago
can't find the article off hand, but this happened only a few years ago in california; someone cut the local phonelines prior to emptying a machine gun into a substation
- wcarss 8y ago
  Google suggests that was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack in 2013 -- AT&T lines were cut and a "team of gunmen" fired shots into several PG&E transformers, causing substantial damage.
  - sgc 8y ago
    This means people decrying the mindset of seriously asking a question about whether this is an attack are very premature and should let the questions be asked and answered in an orderly and prompt fashion. But my money is at least partially on federal understaffing during a shut down having a variety of downstream effects.
    - daodedickinson 8y ago
      Given that Russia has threatened such grid attacks continually for over a decade, it has to be evaluated. It reminds me of the Russian robocalls that have threatened school attacks all over the globe but mostly in the United States in order to further degrade the future output of our education system.
cesarb 8y ago
If both are related, couldn't it be in the opposite direction? The transformer failure damaging (or powering off) some piece of equipment which then leads to the phone system failure? (I don't known which happened first, but on the reddit video of the transformer explosion says "8 hours ago", while this twitter post is 4 hours ago, so I'm guessing the transformer exploded first.)
qjighap 8y ago
>Maybe i'm just being paranoid but I'm a security engineer. I'm supposed to be. No, you really shouldn't. Every bad thing can happen unless you protect against it, but being paranoid isn't helpful for this industry. This was going to happen eventually. If they didn't want this to happen then the funding would be there to have this system built up with triple redundancy (or possibly 7 times, maybe they have triple). We all do the best with the funding we have. The good thing about this is that they assessed the problem and they had remediations for it. They announced it publicly (using several methods) and they have an alternative line.
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
As a Brit it's interesting to see how the default American response to anything out of the ordinary seems to be "we must be under attack!" I don't mean this as any kind of criticism - I guess it's just a cultural difference. For example we had someone shut down the second busiest airport in our country last week by flying a drone around and the assumption here (by the man on the street and the media in general) was "idiot with a new toy" rather than "terrorist attack".
- chimeracoder 8y ago
  > As a Brit it's interesting to see how the default American response to anything out of the ordinary seems to be "we must be under attack!" As a longtime Hacker News reader, it's interesting to see how strong the urge is for non-American readers to make generalizations about Americans based on cherry-picked data that suits their paradigms. > For example we had someone shut down the second busiest airport in our country last week by flying a drone around and the assumption here (by the man on the street and the media in general) was "idiot with a new toy" rather than "terrorist attack". Aside from the fact that (a) there were people speculating about terrorists at LGW, (b) the common response of New Yorkers last night was not to assume it was a terrorist attack, you're also comparing a drone flying over an airport to a massive explosion that lights up the sky for a prolonged period of time - over a minute - with bright pulsating blue light.
- mr_overalls 8y ago
  I think the 9/11 attacks really left their mark on the public consciousness. Add to that the near-daily school shootings, miscellaneous other mass shootings, and general sense of frustration & helplessness about ongoing Russian cyberwarfare and interference with our elections (I mean, for God's sake, it seems reasonable to suspect that our President could actually be a Russian intelligence asset), and the zeitgeist has become one of heightened paranoia.
  - magduf 8y ago
    The only problem with the near-daily school shootings and other mass shootings is that those are a choice that we, as a society, have decided we want to tolerate and have in our lives. It's not an attack from outsiders, it's something that we've decided we want to put up with from our own people because we refuse to change our gun laws. Other developed nations simply do not have this problem, for the very simple reason that they don't have easy access to such weapons. As for the Pres, there again, that's a choice that we made as a society. We elected him after all, and we've continued to defend him no matter what. In short, these are problems of our own making.
kurthr 8y ago
The question you should be asking is, "what could this be covering up?" Why do this now? For the Lulz... or because there was bigger game afoot, could be either one.
madridon1021 8y ago
have a look around this morning NY wasnt the only municipality with "transformer fires" last night https://twitter.com/othersideofgrey/status/1078641674723692545?s=21 https://twitter.com/othersideofgrey/status/10786416747236925...
zipwitch 8y ago
I think it would turn out to be on balance very good for Centurylink's stock price and management if the root cause of the outage was determined to be hostile foreign action instead of, for example, a mix of profiteering and incompetence by company upper management.

matheweis 8y ago

I’m going with Hanlon’s Razor on this. If you wanted to test your cyber weapons, I’d imagine you wouldn’t want to draw too much attention to yourself by testing them simultaneously. On the other hand, years of cost cutting and other “efficiency” measures can easily explain both the problems with the power grid as well as the 911 networks.

pjc50 8y ago
Indeed. Degrade infrastructure overnight and it's a terrorist attack. Degrade it over 20 years and it's "small government".
- Proven 8y ago
  Yeah small government destroys infrastructure because networks and roads are way too sophisticated for private companies to design, build and operate.
- Gravityloss 8y ago
  You can affect this as a foreign power. Pay some think tank to produce material for (so called) media outlets.
  - johnchristopher 8y ago
    I am not a US citizen and not living in the US but I can't recall hearing a foreign official or non-official supporting a reduced US government. US local politicians are vocals enough about it.
    - pjc50 8y ago
      Obviously they wouldn't do so under their own names, but through Macedonian troll factories, opaquely funded think tanks, Russia Today interviews, twitter bots, and so on.
    - Gravityloss 8y ago
      Oh, that would be doing it wrong. Of course it would be presented as locally written journalism, local experts or "concerned citizens" etc. I'm not saying it's happening, but I certainly see the potential profitability in it.
    - mattnewton 8y ago
      I absolutely agree this is a home grown phenomenon but there is some evidence that Russia funneled money to Republicans with these beliefs through the NRA. This is just one example we happen to know about because people are looking under every rock after the 2016 election. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/timeline-of-russian-plot-to-infiltrate-nra-and-gop/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/timeline-of-russian-plot-to-inf...
      - pjc50 8y ago
        The NRA is a great example of this; its president is Oliver North, famously involved in a plot to sell weapons to one enemy of America to illegally support a terrorist organisation in another. I'm sure such an upstanding person has America's best interests at heart. /s
onetimemanytime 8y ago
>>If you wanted to test your cyber weapons, I’d imagine you wouldn’t want to draw too much attention to yourself by testing them simultaneously. Unless you wanted to send a message about "we can do this too" ...or a response. Lots of things we don't know but a few people in NSA/CIA might know what this is about--if it was done by a foreign power. But also things happen by random chance.
starbeast 8y ago
I have said this before, but Hanlon's razor is good for politeness, but not very good for assessing what people are actually up to, as people regularly disguise maliciousness as incompetence and find it fun to do so, especially in politics and other power games. One of the many tricks to power is pleading powerlessness on the things you actually planned ahead of time while claiming full responsibility for things that are accidental.
- shawnz 8y ago
  But what you are describing is already part of the premise of Hanlon's razor. It's true you can't always distinguish maliciousness and incompetence, but incompetence is easier to achieve and so occurs more frequently. That's why any given instance like this is more likely to be incompetence than malice. It's possible this could be some secret plot disguised as incompetence, but it's also totally reasonable for an event like this to happen from incompetence alone, and I don't think it would surprise anyone if that were the case. So we ought to focus on the reality that this kind of outage is totally possible due to incompetence and implement measures to prevent that.
  - starbeast 8y ago
    Not only can you not always distinguish them from each other, but they are very far from being mutually exclusive. Which is somewhere else that Hanlon's razor falls down. It sets them up as being options to choose between, which is obviously a very bad model. To be honest, when I first heard Hanlon's razor, I immediately wondered what nefarious stuff Hanlon had been up to that he wanted to deflect attention away from. Is a bit like the old aphorism 'You can't cheat an honest man', which is of most use to con artists trying to put honest people at ease before then cheating them. edit - also you are misrepresenting Hanlon's razor. It is not an argument that says that stupidity is merely more likely, rather it says - "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".
westpfelia 8y ago
Well an argument to this could be that we cant tell its an attack. In a recent report on US weapon systems it was found that even a simple network scan could crash a system. "Operators reported that they did not suspect a cyber attack because unexplained crashes were normal for the system." That exerpt comes from this report which was released two months ago. https://www.gao.gov/assets/700/694913.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/700/694913.pdf We're no longer in a time when Occams razor tells us that the giant radio active spike over the ocean is a nuclear weapons test. Now Occams razor tells us that every crash is simply due to bad hardware or (and sometimes both) a lack of funding.
- Alex_Fragd 8y ago
  >unexplained crashes were normal for the system this only makes me more concerned
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    It shouldn't really. If they're really common then everyone already knows how to deal with things when the system crashes, it isn't a big deal. What you need to worry about is what happens when the system that has never crashed and that everyone depends on and no one understands goes down.
- magduf 8y ago
  All you have to do is go look at various bridges across the US, and roads in urban areas too. The simple fact is that the US absolutely refuses to maintain or repair infrastructure. So we have bridges rusting apart and even collapsing sometimes with vehicles on them. With a national attitude like that, random unexplained crashes of other critical systems shouldn't be a surprise.
PhasmaFelis 8y ago
> If you wanted to test your cyber weapons, I’d imagine you wouldn’t want to draw too much attention to yourself by testing them simultaneously. True, but that assumes this would be a test rather than an actual attack. There are motives where substantial but non-crippling disruption could be the goal.
- Moru 8y ago
  You don't test your cyber weapons so anyone notices. It's giving away that you have a weapon and gives your enemy time to adapt and protect themselves. Mabe it's someone tired of the boss not listening to the complaints of potentially crippling bugs in the security and is now doing a presentation of what would happen to society if he does not get to fix the bug? Or a provider of DDOS-protection that is running their own DDOS botnet for kicks? Mirai comes to mind here... :-)
  - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
    > You don't test your cyber weapons so anyone notices. Yes, I know. I'm saying it's not impossible that this is an actual attack, not a test.
samstave 8y ago
If you recall the stuxnet attack against iran, it was israel who went ahead and deployed the attack against the wishes of the nsa - as they were chomping at the bit to test it. Also, they made their tracks known with Torrah quotes in the code.

cobookman 8y ago

Unless you knew the us government would know you did it. And this was to show them just how much you've compromised the us...and are making it known.

elihu 8y ago

If I were a hostile country and wanted to create a bit of chaos, I imagine I would try to do it at the most inconvenient time possible. Like, say, when the markets are unusually volatile and the president has been doing things that put everyone on edge, like fire his defense secretary and shut down the government. Of course, it's also quite likely that this is just a coincidence and the transformer and network outage were just ordinary accidents.

mistermann 8y ago
Hostile entity might be a better term considering the times we live in.
hopler 8y ago
The US has been volatile for 2 years running. Cherrypicking examples to create the appearance of rare coincidence is bad stats.
- yebyen 8y ago
  But... we are in the middle of a government shutdown, aren't we? And the stock market is also going bonkers just this last few days. Those are facts, and today this is another one. That's not cherry picking. That's not comprehensive or exhaustive fact-checking either. But they are sure facts!
sgc 8y ago
Or it might be directly related to furloughs somewhere leading to insufficient network maintenance.

petee 8y ago

can't find the article off hand, but this happened only a few years ago in california; someone cut the local phonelines prior to emptying a machine gun into a substation

wcarss 8y ago
Google suggests that was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack in 2013 -- AT&T lines were cut and a "team of gunmen" fired shots into several PG&E transformers, causing substantial damage.
- sgc 8y ago
  This means people decrying the mindset of seriously asking a question about whether this is an attack are very premature and should let the questions be asked and answered in an orderly and prompt fashion. But my money is at least partially on federal understaffing during a shut down having a variety of downstream effects.
  - daodedickinson 8y ago
    Given that Russia has threatened such grid attacks continually for over a decade, it has to be evaluated. It reminds me of the Russian robocalls that have threatened school attacks all over the globe but mostly in the United States in order to further degrade the future output of our education system.

cesarb 8y ago

If both are related, couldn't it be in the opposite direction? The transformer failure damaging (or powering off) some piece of equipment which then leads to the phone system failure? (I don't known which happened first, but on the reddit video of the transformer explosion says "8 hours ago", while this twitter post is 4 hours ago, so I'm guessing the transformer exploded first.)

qjighap 8y ago

>Maybe i'm just being paranoid but I'm a security engineer. I'm supposed to be. No, you really shouldn't. Every bad thing can happen unless you protect against it, but being paranoid isn't helpful for this industry. This was going to happen eventually. If they didn't want this to happen then the funding would be there to have this system built up with triple redundancy (or possibly 7 times, maybe they have triple). We all do the best with the funding we have. The good thing about this is that they assessed the problem and they had remediations for it. They announced it publicly (using several methods) and they have an alternative line.

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago

As a Brit it's interesting to see how the default American response to anything out of the ordinary seems to be "we must be under attack!" I don't mean this as any kind of criticism - I guess it's just a cultural difference. For example we had someone shut down the second busiest airport in our country last week by flying a drone around and the assumption here (by the man on the street and the media in general) was "idiot with a new toy" rather than "terrorist attack".

chimeracoder 8y ago
> As a Brit it's interesting to see how the default American response to anything out of the ordinary seems to be "we must be under attack!" As a longtime Hacker News reader, it's interesting to see how strong the urge is for non-American readers to make generalizations about Americans based on cherry-picked data that suits their paradigms. > For example we had someone shut down the second busiest airport in our country last week by flying a drone around and the assumption here (by the man on the street and the media in general) was "idiot with a new toy" rather than "terrorist attack". Aside from the fact that (a) there were people speculating about terrorists at LGW, (b) the common response of New Yorkers last night was not to assume it was a terrorist attack, you're also comparing a drone flying over an airport to a massive explosion that lights up the sky for a prolonged period of time - over a minute - with bright pulsating blue light.
mr_overalls 8y ago
I think the 9/11 attacks really left their mark on the public consciousness. Add to that the near-daily school shootings, miscellaneous other mass shootings, and general sense of frustration & helplessness about ongoing Russian cyberwarfare and interference with our elections (I mean, for God's sake, it seems reasonable to suspect that our President could actually be a Russian intelligence asset), and the zeitgeist has become one of heightened paranoia.
- magduf 8y ago
  The only problem with the near-daily school shootings and other mass shootings is that those are a choice that we, as a society, have decided we want to tolerate and have in our lives. It's not an attack from outsiders, it's something that we've decided we want to put up with from our own people because we refuse to change our gun laws. Other developed nations simply do not have this problem, for the very simple reason that they don't have easy access to such weapons. As for the Pres, there again, that's a choice that we made as a society. We elected him after all, and we've continued to defend him no matter what. In short, these are problems of our own making.

kurthr 8y ago

The question you should be asking is, "what could this be covering up?" Why do this now? For the Lulz... or because there was bigger game afoot, could be either one.

madridon1021 8y ago

have a look around this morning NY wasnt the only municipality with "transformer fires" last night https://twitter.com/othersideofgrey/status/1078641674723692545?s=21 https://twitter.com/othersideofgrey/status/10786416747236925...

zipwitch 8y ago

I think it would turn out to be on balance very good for Centurylink's stock price and management if the root cause of the outage was determined to be hostile foreign action instead of, for example, a mix of profiteering and incompetence by company upper management.