3 ms·
An even more stealth method is to make the system work perfectly if everything is running fine. Like correctly reporting net frequency in the range 49-51 Hz but
by std_throwaway 7y ago
An even more stealth method is to make the system work perfectly if everything is running fine. Like correctly reporting net frequency in the range 49-51 Hz but reporting false values when outside of that range. That way there will be no detectable errors until everything starts behaving erratically.
The best way for a society to prepare is to have a few small incidents that put the safety systems to the test on a regular basis.
- KyleJ61782 7y agoThis. Very much this. In the presentations I've seen on the matter, the most vulnerable systems are those measuring and carrying telemetry back from various meters around the power system. One doesn't have to directly compromise the system to have an effect. Simply providing bad data to automated protection systems could be enough to cause instability.
- Aeolun 7y agoChaos monkey for your electricity grid!
- _def 7y agoReminds me of stuxnet
- kylegordon 7y agoLikewise. Sadly not many people in this thread seem to be aware of this method.
- FartyMcFarter 7y agoStuxnet was damaging equipment by running it in slightly bad ways once in a while. That seems to be a quite different attack from something that causes a sudden outage.
- beamatronic 7y agoWell, that and decentralizing your power infrastructure.
- justapassenger 7y agoDecentralized grid will have less ability to deal with spikes in load, and be more unstable as a result. Question in cases like this is often - do you want to have a lot of smaller outages all the time or bigger, but less common outages.
- devnulloverflow 7y agoThe answer to the genre of questions is that you always want fewer small problems, and more day-to-day efficiency... ... until the big disaster actually happens at which time at which point it's simply criminal that such things were allowed to happen.
- Reason077 7y ago”Like correctly reporting net frequency in the range 49-51 Hz but reporting false values when outside of that range.” You can’t fake the system frequency like that. Anyone connected to the grid can observe/measure the system frequency trivially - you could do so right now at the nearest 10A socket. The attack you describe would require compromising large numbers of diverse, distributed generation and frequency response assets. It would be like trying to fool everyone into thinking it’s a hot day by hacking every single thermometer!
- delfinom 7y agoYep. Once one meter starts reporting the wrong frequency vs the thousands of other ones. It'll simply be taken offline and replaced because it could just be a broken one. Depending on severity, the gig could be up if the meter is sent back to the manufacturer for "repair".
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