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What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

practical.engineering

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Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#21

Post by gonzo41 »

LarryMullins wrote: post #10

It's quite interesting that they also attacked a substation that looked important on a map, but wasn't actually vital. I think some of the early reporting about this incident suggested they "knew what they were doing", but the apparent misidentification of one of their targets perhaps suggests the perpetrators were making educated guesses, without detailed/insider knowledge of how the system worked.

I bet they used the wrong maps. Like a topo or regular driving map. If they'd gone that one step further and gotten the utility GIS layers Tthings could have gotten a lot more out of hand.

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#22

Post by Spooky23 »

Waterluvian wrote: post #7

My wild, unsubstantiated guess: This is being taken very seriously because the power grid, as Grady points out, is incredibly vulnerable and out in the open. I don’t think it’s because there’s some conspiracy by Russia or whatever.

Russia isn’t engaging in some conspiracy, but they’ve certainly successfully run influence operations targeting the disaffected and vulnerable. There’s plenty of open source information about how active Russian agents were influential in organizations like the NRA.

The United States is less stable than it was 30 years ago. The rot is starting in the periphery with the lack of opportunity or prosperity in rural America. That is the tinder that fuels modern nut job gun culture, q, militias and other fringe organizations that now have national prominence.

Undermining infrastructure is an early goal of insurgencies. I’m sure we’ll have active areas that are unsafe to travel for outsiders in the next 10-15 years outside of government control.

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#23

Post by blkhawk »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #16
LarryMullins wrote: post #10

It's quite interesting that they also attacked a substation that looked important on a map, but wasn't actually vital. I think some of the early reporting about this incident suggested they "knew what they were doing", but the apparent misidentification of one of their targets perhaps suggests the perpetrators were making educated guesses, without detailed/insider knowledge of how the system worked.

If we are wildly speculating, it's possible that those other targets could have had compatible Hardware. Alternatively, they could have been looking to disable power to something off the secondary branch and hit both for redundancy

the other hit station looks on a map of larger scale as if its connected to the higher voltage national grid. Only with a sufficiently high resolution map can you see that the power-lines are just running in parallel for a bit and that there is a gap. Since the voltages are that are transformed are different i don't think the transformers would be at all compatible. But i am not an expert either:)

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#24

Post by jfengel »

NavinF wrote: post #18

Last para is pretty relevant: "But it’s important to put this event in context as well. Attacks on the power grid are relatively rare, and they fall pretty low on the list of threats, even behind cybersecurity and supply chain issues. The number one threat to the grid in nearly every place in the US? The weather. If you experience an outage of any length, it's many times more likely to be mother nature than a bad act…

They're rare because nobody is doing them. If some group decides that it's a thing to do, it will increase rapidly in frequency.

I don't know what the limitations are, and maybe natural disasters will continue to dominate. But I wouldn't extrapolate just because it hadn't been the mechanism of choice so far.

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#26

Post by hgsgm »

plsksosl wrote: post #9
Hellion wrote: post #6

Very possibly, the FBI has some strong leads, and are building a case. This is something on the national scale with lots of federal internal attention - reports likely even having hit the potus desk. I doubt we’ll hear much about this again unless there’s an arrest.

[flagged]

What do you mean? Law enforcement doesn't comment on details of an investigation except when asking for help finding suspects. If they have suspects they have to investigate quietly until they have enough evidence for an arrest.

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#27

Post by jbigelow76 »

JasonFruit wrote: post #4

I'm much more interested in the motivations of the people involved.

It's bonkers (and infuriating) to me that domestic terrorists launched an attack on their own home soil and it wasn't front page news everywhere the next day.

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#28

Post by andrewflnr »

NavinF wrote: post #18

Last para is pretty relevant: "But it’s important to put this event in context as well. Attacks on the power grid are relatively rare, and they fall pretty low on the list of threats, even behind cybersecurity and supply chain issues. The number one threat to the grid in nearly every place in the US? The weather. If you experience an outage of any length, it's many times more likely to be mother nature than a bad act…

I actually don't think that's terribly relevant. Deliberate attacks are qualitatively different from natural events. They're not independent, so naive statistical comparisons are misleading. In particular, deliberate attacks have a significant social component, where the success of one attack, especially one that is widely known, can lead to more being attempted. Attackers can adapt to your countermeasures. There also seem to be an increasing number of people willing to destroy critical bits of society.

In short, past rates are not a guarantee of future risks. I expect infrastructure attacks to be a growing problem.

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#29

Post by flabbergasted »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #19

I think it's interesting Russia isn't doing more things like this in protest of Ukraine support, whether this was them or not. Realistically, two teams of 5 guys with good opsec training could probably take out any infrastructure they wanted, and do it repeatedly

I'm guessing that even if the odds are minuscule, if they were caught, the consequences would be too disastrous for everybody, to make it worth it.

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#30

Post by LarryMullins »

blkhawk wrote: post #23
s1artibartfast wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we are wildly speculating, it's possible that those other targets could have had compatible Hardware. Alternatively, they could have been looking to disable power to something off the secondary branch and hit both for redundancy

the other hit station looks on a map of larger scale as if its connected to the higher voltage national grid. Only with a sufficiently high resolution map can you see that the power-lines are just running in parallel for a bit and that there is a gap. Since the voltages are that are transformed are different i don't think the transformers would be at all compatible. But i am not an expert either:)

It's possible that their true target was in the neighborhood of the second station, that the second station wasn't actually misidentified. But I guess we'll only know for sure when they get caught.
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