You Don't Need a Cyber Attack to Take Down The North American Power Grid

You Don't Need a Cyber Attack to Take Down The North American Power Grid



http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2012/03/you-dont-need-a
-cyber-attack-to-take-down-the-north-american-power-grid.html

The Obama administration simulated a cyber attack on New York City's power
supply in a Senate demonstration aimed at winning support for legislation to
boost the nation's computer defenses. Senators from both parties gathered
behind closed doors in the Capitol Wednesday for the classified briefing
attended by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, FBI Director
Robert Mueller and other administration officials. The mock attack on the
city during a summer heat wave was "very compelling," said Sen. Susan
Collins, R-Maine, who is co-sponsoring a cybersecurity bill supported by
President Barack Obama. "It illustrated the problem and why legislation is
desperately needed," she said as she left the briefing. Bloomberg.

The US defense industry is in a full court press to get tens of billions in
funding for cyberwarfare.

To get that funding, they need to dramatize the potential threat of
cyberwarfare.  Here's how.  The central method of attack in cyberwarfare is
systems disruption.  Systems disruption is a way to break networks to
achieve extremely high levels of damage (or, in financial terms, high ROIs).
One of the best ways to demonstrate that type of attack is through a
disruption of the power supply (usually with NYC as a target).

The problem with this type of presentation is that you don't need
cyberwarfare to do take down the electricity to New York City and get away
with it.  All you need is some household tools, imagination, and some
knowledge of what the network looks like (gained by an effort at mapping the
connections).  Since 99.9999% of the recruits available to most violent
groups don't have cyber skills and the impact of a cyber attack and a
physical attack are the same, which method do you think will be used?  The
facts back this up.  99.99% of the intentional system disruption events that
have occurred over the last decade have been caused through physical attack
and not by cyber attack.

So, in other words, the tens billions we are going to spend on cybersecurity
is mostly a waste of time/money.  It's not only a waste of money, it's yet
another example of how the US national security system is not producing
real, tangible security for the people it expects to pay for it.    The real
solution to network vulnerability?  Decentralized production.  The tech is
available.  If the billions spent on cyber were spent on growing local
production by building resilient communities, it wouldn't only make us safer
it would likely ignite an economic Renaissance.

Unfortunately, to the people running the US/EU, the long term economic
success of the citizens they are supposed to represent is not even on their
priority list.

If you are interested, here's some analysis on how vulnerable the
electricity grid we rely upon is.   An evergreen (in that it always yields
results) target of global guerrillas, will be the large infrastructure
networks that national economies rely upon (as do all modern developed
economies). The most critical and complex network is our power grid which
contains over 1 m kilometers of high-voltage power lines between 115 -765
kVs. The network can be further subdivided into the following:

   1,633 generator nodes.
   2,179 disribution substation nodes.
   10,287 transmission substation nodes.
Read more...
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2004/09/global_guerrill
.html
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