Massive Power Outages In Brazil Caused By Hackers 462
Hugh Pickens writes "CBS reports on 60 minutes that a massive two-day power outage in Brazil's Espirito Santo State affecting more than three million people in 2007, and another, smaller event in three cities north of Rio de Janeiro in January 2005, were perpetrated by hackers manipulating control systems. Former Chief of US National Intelligence Retired Adm. Mike McConnell says that the 'United States is not prepared for such an attack' and believes it could happen in America. 'If I were an attacker and wanted to do strategic damage to the United States, I would either take the cold of winter or the heat of summer,' says McConnell, 'I would probably sack electric power on the US East Coast, maybe the West Coast and attempt to cause a cascading effect.' Congressman Jim Langevin says that US power companies need to be forced to deal with the issue after they told Congress they would take steps to defend their operations but did not follow up. 'They admit that they misled Congress. The private sector has different priorities than we do in providing security. Their bottom line is about profits,' says Langevin. 'We need to change their motivation so that when see vulnerability like this, we can require them to fix it.' McConnell adds that a similar attack to the one in Brazil is poised to take place on US soil and that it may take some horrific event to get the country focused on shoring up cyber security. 'If the power grid was taken off line in the middle of winter and it caused people to suffer and die, that would galvanize the nation. I hope we don't get there.'"
Good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably impossible.
As we all should know by now, impenetrable security doesn't exist. What we should probably have is tighter backup power for essential services and places like hospitals, where local redundancy could help in the face of a remote 'hacker' type attack
Places where there is a lot of danger for people without electrical power don't need billions spent on the security of their power systems. They need redundancy, generators in their buildings that could be used to keep people alive, batteries, and common sense.
Oh well, let's spend a bunch of money on fear like we always do.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Internets... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see why they can't just buy a phone line for each power station and link to central stations (also with NON-Internet-facing systems) like that.
Nostalgia (Score:3, Insightful)
What short memories these "experts" have (Score:1, Insightful)
That already happened [wikipedia.org], you moron. And nothing has been done to fix it because repairing infrastructure isn't sexy enough to get politicians elected.
Re:Hit'em in their wallets (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hit'em in their wallets (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, the energy sector has traditionally been heavily regulated, and works well compared to the huge mess the deregulated banking system made of itself. You do realize that the government took over the banking sector because the bankers failed to run it?
Re:Hit'em in their wallets (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, of course! The government has already taken over the banking sector, the mortgage sector, the automotive sector, is about to take over the healthcare sector, so fuck it - the government may as well take over the energy sector as well. I can't wait until they take over food distribution - I've always wanted to know what it's like to stand in line for a loaf of bread all day.
I am not a fan of government intervention either, nor do I like what was done with banking and automobiles. Having said that, this isn't what is being proposed here. If the electric utilities must comply with laws mandating that they meet or exceed a minimum standard of security, this would be much more like the way local Board of Health requires that restaurants handle food in ways that prevent food poisoning. The Board of Health does not own the restaurants and it does not choose their management; it just periodically inspects them and can shut them down if there are egregious violations. Something similar could be worked out for the power companies when it comes to security.
Re:Hit'em in their wallets (Score:5, Insightful)
If they won't integrate safety systems to protect the system properly from hacker attacks, hit them in the wallet, hard. Pass sound regulation to force them to implement safeguards, require inspections/audits that they are done, not just take their BS word for it.
Yes, of course! The government has already taken over the banking sector, the mortgage sector, the automotive sector, is about to take over the healthcare sector, so fuck it - the government may as well take over the energy sector as well. I can't wait until they take over food distribution - I've always wanted to know what it's like to stand in line for a loaf of bread all day.
The great blackout of 2003, which took out the north east united states and a good chunk of ontario, was caused by deregulation (removing the requirement to clear the branches around the power lines [wikipedia.org]).
Quebec, which has state-owned power (Hydro-Quebec) was not hit hard by that blackout, because it keeps its grid out of phase with those dangerously unregulated parts around it.
Learn the lesson: You can't trust the greedy to run critical infrastructure.
Re:Those gosh-darned HACKERS again (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. We lost the terminology war a decade ago. It's time we deal with it.
Re:Your official guide to the Jigaboo presidency (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the remedy for bad speech is more speech. Censorship is never justified. If a post gives you the vapors, stop reading it. A free society is one where it's perfectly fine to stand on a soapbox and make a fool of yourself. I'd like Slashdot to stay as free as possible.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Like we'd respond that well (Score:5, Insightful)
If 9/11 was any indication, our national response would be characterized by...
Only in my wildest fantasies would such an attack mobilize the country to have a rational, balanced cyber-security posture.
Re:Hit'em in their wallets (Score:2, Insightful)
But how much energy can congress really expect them to expend defending against imagined threats?
There's nothing imagined about any of these threats. They are very, very real. What we know about is scary enough, what we may yet learn could be truly frightening. Maybe you caught that little part in the story where the military is having some of their computer chips made overseas. I wonder how much money you'd think it would be worth to stop four of five of our own Predators and Reapers from bombing US cities? Or a couple nukes going off in their silos? Or all of our refineries melting down at once while the rest of us are sitting around in the dark?
Virtually all our PC's, processors and hard drives are made overseas. By sending all our manufacturing overseas, we may be setting ourselves up for an attack that will make 9/11 look like lunch at Hooters.
We already know what happens when someone whines about imaginary threats...like foreigners taking airline flight lessons.
Naive Population (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:America? (Score:5, Insightful)
English is defined by customary usage. If you said "In America" to 100 English speakers, MAYBE one would include any other country than the US. If you're lucky.
Re:Your official guide to the Jigaboo presidency (Score:2, Insightful)
Why can't people stop biting on lame cut'n'paste trolls?
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, if only someone would invent a way to transmit data using light, maybe over a long fibre of some transparent material...
why can the hacks do somefun like unlocking all ch (Score:1, Insightful)
why can the hacks do something like unlocking all channels in a cable system?
I think if some one where to hack in the power system and set all bills to $0 then you will see a big move to lock the system down.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no need to reinvent the wheel, the power companies should just be using proper compartmentalization techniques to dig some trenches between the internet and their systems.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:3, Insightful)
It is easy to say that a data center needs its own source of standby power, but there are a lot of industries where a one minute outage causes a six to twelve-hour restart time, and the margins are far too thin to support the additional generation infrastructure.
I know a few people putting in multi-megawatt fuel cell systems, but these have the same restart-time problem that the utility grid has, which is ultimately the problem.
The easiest fix at a utility scale is to increase the amount of spinning reserve so that causing a cascading failure requires control of multiple generating facilities. Once you trip a facility offline, re-start times are just way too long, especially given emmissions controls.
I have trouble believing that the "smart grid" really solves this, although you can do some things with networked protection strategies and more selective load shed.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:3, Insightful)
So each facility evaluates its energy reliability needs. Some may come to the conclusion that they need higher reliability than what the local utility provides. But today, that's just based on gut feelings. Because there is no reliability or 'uptime' standard to which utilities must adhere. And as a result, there's no marginal price for additional MTBF or grid uptime. So people who think they need better reliability just go out and buy their own genset.
In some ways, this is analogous to servers. Everyone can go out and buy their own box and stick it in a co-location facility. Maybe install a redundant one at a remote facility. But as we (most of us) know, shared servers and virtualization are much more economical ways of allocating and managing server resources. But that works because we can put dollar figures on storage, bandwidth, and db queries.
To date, electrical utilities and their regulating commissions have established simple price structures that map all costs to dollars per killowatt-hour charges. There are no penalties or rebates for power outages based on either duration and/or frequency. And its not likely that utilities and regulators are going to embrace shifting part of the revenue structure from an energy charge to an availability or reliability charge. To do so would alter the consumer's perception of the cost of power and might result in an increase in consumption. For example, where I live (the Pacific Northwest of the USA), the 'fuel' or energy costs are actually quite low. Most of our utilities costs are fixed, for system operation and maintenence. But we are charged (primarily) a fee for energy used. If our bills reflected the true cost distribution, energy conservation would be a thing of the past.
Re:Hit'em in their wallets (Score:2, Insightful)
These bankers, how exactly did they "fail"? And it seems their only "punishment" was a bonus, or a job offer... running the SEC??
Re:You need SCADA security (Score:3, Insightful)
Then again I could just take my $2000 plasma cutter, $500 generator and $6000 hilux and head up into the mountains and take down three or four high voltage towers and kill power to about 8 million people for a week or more and be home before nightfall. Just in time to laugh at all of you while you scream in hysteria demanding quadzillions be spent on protecting over hyped "attack vectors".
Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees...
But as long as it's protected by fancy sounding acronyms it appears the white shirts are satisfied.
goes good with popcorn (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh yeah, well if I were an attacker, I would build a gravity weapon so powerful that it would pull the moon out of its orbit and crash it into the earth.
OR I would create a poison so potent that just a few drops of it in any lake would kill everyone within a 5-mile radius.
OR I would plant thermonuclear bombs in the capitals of the 10 largest cities in the U.S. and detonate them all at once.
See, Mike McConnell? It's easy to invent terrorist movie plots [schneier.com]. If they gave out awards for Most Creative Terrorist Strategies That Would Never Work, you all all of your three-letter agencies would win first prize every time.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:3, Insightful)
prove it, damn defeatists always claim that a perfect system is impossible. Hire competent workers ...
And there's your problem right there.
Even the DoD and the CIA still hire the occassional spy and give them top secret security clearance.
If bad actors can't crack the hardware or software, they will always find a problem exists between keyboard and chair.
Obvious solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Why the hell is this so hard to figure out? Hold cooperation responsible for the negative effects caused by their negligence. Power going out because a skilled hacker found an exploit that the best security experts couldn't find is one thing. But power going out because the IT dept. at the power company decided that they didn't need to take basic security measures is another, that's negligance.
If people die because the power went out and the power went out due to negligence (i.e. some 15 year old managed to ssh into the power plant and fuck everything up because the root password was "password") then charge the company with criminally negligent homicide.
We don't need some special, new incentive to get companies to protect the public interest. We just need to remove all of the immunity we've given the companies. The only question we have to answer here is why the fuck did we give companies immunity from the consequences of their actions?
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
As we all should know by now, impenetrable security doesn't exist.
Totally impenetrable physical security doesn't exist, but totally impenetrable electronic security most certainly does. It's quite simple to make something completely immune to hacker attacks over the internet: disconnect it from the internet!
Why the nation's power grid control absolutely needs to be tied into the internet, I have no idea. Maybe someone in the field can enlighten me. But if this is a big concern, it seems like it'd be pretty to eliminate the security threat by not having any control over the power grid exposed to the internet. If someone needs to exercise some control over the system, they have to get in their car and drive to the power plant.
Of course, this wouldn't prevent someone from sneaking in somehow, but that's a far more remote danger than some hacker on the internet (who could be anywhere in the world, and probably not anywhere near your power plant) gaining access.
Re:Hit'em in their wallets (Score:2, Insightful)
Nonsense. The banks failed for one reason and one reason only. Their greed was not checked by adequate government oversight. Remove all regulation and you'll find that they will just rip more people off faster all while enjoying their "too big to fail" status.
As for the power company, they have a natural monopoly simply because we can't have 3 or more sets of everything running everywhere. Just how many poles do you want in your yard? I suppose the distribution net could be public with multiple power companies using it, but then we're back to "socialism".
Smart grid makes it more exposed to hacking (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good luck with that (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hit'em in their wallets (Score:3, Insightful)
"Well, the energy sector has traditionally been heavily regulated, and works well compared"
Well excepting for that Enron/Dynegy/Reliant/Williams thing where they nearly bankrupted California manipulating the electricity market, shutting off power plants to create artificial shortages for example, and FERC mostly sat on the sidelines watching.
And then of course there was oil spiking to $140 a barrel due to market manipulation, though chances are you can probably blame a fair bit of that on Goldman/Citi and other big Wall Street banks manipulating the commodities markets for profit.
I disagree with the military... I am brazilian... (Score:5, Insightful)
The blackout in 2005 was a human failure. One transmission line went down, the team recovering that line made a mistake and instead of activating the repaired line disabled the backup line. Result: 3 states withou electric power.
The blackout in 2007 was due a circuit breaker shutting down one line, the same happening after in the backup line, that could manage the excess load (this happened during peak hours, 5 p.m. during a working day).
Ok, these are official explanations and the blackouts may have been caused by evil hackers but, in this case, the brazilian government made an excelent job holding that information for years, leaking now thanks to an american former military that may have some vested interest spreading fear.
2 cents..
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
As we all should know by now, impenetrable security doesn't exist. What we should probably have is tighter backup power for essential services and places like hospitals, where local redundancy could help in the face of a remote 'hacker' type attack
Places where there is a lot of danger for people without electrical power don't need billions spent on the security of their power systems. They need redundancy, generators in their buildings that could be used to keep people alive, batteries, and common sense.
This isn't about impenetrable security. This is about taking basic precautions about known attack vectors. For example, many of these systems are not fail safe so an attacker can actually cause a generator to physically destroy itself. Since these generators are very specialized pieces of equipment, you don't just go to Home Depot and pick up another one.
It is not enough to protect hospitals, etc. A prolonged loss of power to the northern part of the US in the depths of winter would be devastating. Even with backup power supplies, no one has plans to deal with a month of no electricity.
This isn't about spending money on fear. It is about naively ignoring a threat and hoping it will never happen. We need to find a way to force utility companies to take these threats seriously and the only way to do that is to have financial penalties for lax security.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:3, Insightful)
Still worried about the possibility of remote hacking from a guy who spent too much time climbing trees in his childhood? Again: airgap. The only bits that should flow between the data transciever in the substation and the actual critical hardware shouldn't flow directly. Observe below:
[Command/Control Center] -----dedicated line-----[Rx/Tx Computer]---Low BW Link----[Local Control Computer]----Hardware
The local control computer, which should be locked up in the substation with a big steel door on it should have internal software interlocks in it that reject bad input from the physically separate transceiver unit. By physically separate, I mean really physically separate, as in one wire per bit for commands and one analog channel for values. Possibly optical lines if we're paranoid about RFI. Now, in order to hack that one substation, the hacker has to physically break into it. At which point we're back to the vulnerability inherent in any distributed dumb system.
I take cash or check.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good luck with that (Score:1, Insightful)
Amusingly it is all about management. Of course it is.
Unless you keep a separate control station on each operator's desk that is completely cut off from internet you will have the potential of such a security hole. Most systems are not made that way for a reason. Cost.
I have too much inside information on some norwegian systems and I've intentionally left out some details but here goes....
The main control system of an oil rig is run on a token ring network (infi90, Bailey Controls product).
This loop is connected to a gateway that hooks it up to a redundant ethernet network. ("Control Network")
This control network is again connected to an OPC gateway that connects it to another redundant ethernet network ("client/server")
This client/server network is connected to a firewall which routes some ports from the outside to the inside.
The outside network is an internal network of BigOilCompany.
Through yet another firewall this network is connected to the office network of BigOilCompany (still a fairly secure network).
Through their main firewall the office network is connected to the internet.
Why is it all connected? Because when shit happens you want to be able to get the right people connected fast as hell. You also want to be able to share data between systems. It is a highly complex system after all!
Technically speaking the control network is connected to the internet. There -is- a potential for a cracking attempt here.. Very unlikely as you would have to pass through at least 3 firewalls of different brands (no single vuln can do it that way).
As for the power issues I would point out that all the various switching stations, power plants, transformer farms etc have to be very closely connected for regulating the load and production of power. If something bad happens (like a blown transformer) you dont have all that many seconds to reroute power before you end up with a cascade failure. "Isolated" systems dont do that well. They can of course disconnect themselves to protect the hardware but that would -cause- a cascade ;)
So... This is a whole lot harder to do that you'd think. Just something to think about.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably impossible.
As we all should know by now, impenetrable security doesn't exist.
Maybe not. But a good first step would be to not connect critical infrastructure to the internet.
Re:Naive Population (Score:3, Insightful)
The government is just a corporate sock puppet, and blaming the government is one of the oldest tricks in the corporate handbook.
1) Lobby for deregulation
2) Profit
3) Shit hits the fan
4) Blame the goverment
5) GOTO 1
Re:Hit'em in their wallets (Score:2, Insightful)
He's right, you were being highly pedantic and confrontational, only barely challenging his statements.
It does give people the impression that, as previously stated, you are a twat.
Mod me down. It'll be a first for me
Re:America? (Score:2, Insightful)
First, because English is defined by customary usage: if, for instance, a majority of English speakers start pronouncing a word in a different way, then that pronunciation will become valid after a while. The shift could also occur semantically. The French have the Académie française [wikipedia.org], the Germans have the Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung [wikipedia.org]; but for the English tongue, there exist no such academy.
Secondly, one should not forget that language is by no means systematic. Take the word "anti-Semitism," for example. We all know it means "hatred towards Jews." Now, let's decompose that word for analytical purposes:
- anti- means "against"
- Semite means "Semitic-speaking person"
Woah, wait... Arabic — among other languages — is also a Semitic language. So why has the word "Semite" come to specifically designate Jews? For the same reason we call the United States "America" or the Caribbeans, the "West Indies."
So, the bottom line is: in linguistics, pragmatism often wins where logics ought to prevail.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh well, let's spend a bunch of money on fear like we always do.
Terrorists are the least of out worries here in the midwest US. In the winer we have ice storms, in the spring and summer we have storms and wind. An outage caused by hackers probably wouldn't last lomg here, but when a tornado rips through and destroys every utility pole and the equipment hanging from them, it'll take a while to get back on line.
When the tornados ripped through here in 2006, [slashdot.org] as I walked through the destruction in search of a hot cup of coffee the next day, the thing I thought most was "If Bin Laden saw this he'd give up. No way could a terrorist do this much damage!"
The threat is narural events. The danger from terrorists is minimal.
Why have these systems on the internet? (Score:2, Insightful)
cyber bullshit .. (Score:3, Insightful)
Authorities blame human error for Jan.1 blackout - Brazil [bnamericas.com]
A power cut
Re:Hit'em in their wallets (Score:4, Insightful)
We can't know what would happen if banks were fully deregulated
read a little history [virginia.edu], young man.
Lets see, if I'm unhappy about the level of service of my current utility what are my options? Not a whole lot.
Exactly. They are beholden to the shareholders, not their customers. They're a monopoly and don't have to care about their customers. A lot of the financial mess we're in now is a result of businesses that aren't monopolies acting as if they were.
My utility company is owned by the city. If they piss me off I'll not vote for the incumbant mayor (an dthat's happened here before). As a result, we get cheap dependable power.
Or you know, how about allowing utility companies to actually compete for prices, service and security.
And how do you go about that? Have ten different power grids in your town with ten electric companies, all with their own poles and cables? Utilities are a natural monoploly and NEED to be heavily regulated. Actually, natural monopolies shouw be owned by the city or state. It's the only way they can be held accountable to the people who pay them.