Electricity Terrorism?

kfrp

An way to terrorists to shut down cities as we rely so much on electricity for everything.

I can't post links as I'm a new user but Turkey had a huge outage recently along with Holland.

Definitely possible?

Overheal

Naturally possible. More of a case of cybersecurity experts waving the flag about this for decades, and less about this being a hidden lurking danger.

My favorite thread in the Windows forum to date was about 5 years ago, some numpty who worked at a power plant was trying to get a Windows 95 machine on the internet. Nevermind that the machine was critical to plant operations, the lad wanted to play facebook on the job so **** safety.

Especially at new plants, air-gapped computer systems are regularly in place from what I know. These machines have no functional need to be online, and thus are not. They control critical valves, solenoids, inputs, outputs, etc. etc. that make things do science-awesome industry stuff. Heck, a lab computer I've used recently is a Windows 3.1 machine that is air-gapped, because you really don't need much more than MS-DOS scripts to run our test plans - just fire some solenoids, flow some natural gas around some tubes and spit out test data onto a floppy disk, to be imported onto a modern machine via USB reader.

I think if you look around there are some minor instances of remote attacks occurring at plants in the past, but nothing that resulted in catastrophe. China is always a prime suspect, but lets face it just in the last 2 weeks world powers have all started "leaking" their cyber-warfare capabilities: first China's capabilities were 'leaked' and admitted to; a couple days later there was a "leak" of NSA capabilities, and then Canada just said "whoops someone leaked our cyberpenis too".

SpaceSasqwatch

kinda off topic but enron had contacts within the companies that ran the american power grid and regularly had 'power outtages' to boost their share price

cml387

A bit of plastique placed on stategically located pylons would be a much easier and more effective method.

Overheal

cml387 wrote: »

A bit of plastique placed on stategically located pylons would be a much easier and more effective method.

Easier by whose standards? That requires being at the location, bypassing physical - often armed - security, etc.

To think that no country with nuclear reactors has ever had those reactors targeted is a blessing. There's more than one reason nuclear powers don't try to **** with each other

cameramonkey

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/how-ira-plotted-to-switch-off-london-1266533.html

This was an alleged IRA operation to disrupt London's supply.