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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?

#161

Post by neuronexmachina »

mc32 wrote: post #5

"Officials have stopped short of calling it an act of terrorism, presumably because we don’t know the motive of whoever perpetrated the act" There was another one elsewhere [Washington state [1]] and they found out the perps did it to facilitate knocking over some business of some sort. So, just because it quacks like a duck does not mean it either walks like a duck nor end ends up being a duck. There have also been…

Prior to Greenwood & Crahan's attack on the substation in WA on Dec 25, in the weeks prior there were also >=6 other substation attacks in WA and OR. As far as I can tell, nobody's been caught in any of the earlier attacks, and they don't seem to have been tied to any burglaries: https://www.opb.org/article/2022/12/08/string-of-electrical-...

For reference, Greenwood & Crahan's indictment: https://www.justice.gov/media/1266956/dl?inline

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

#162

Post by shagmin »

mc32 wrote: post #5

"Officials have stopped short of calling it an act of terrorism, presumably because we don’t know the motive of whoever perpetrated the act" There was another one elsewhere [Washington state [1]] and they found out the perps did it to facilitate knocking over some business of some sort. So, just because it quacks like a duck does not mean it either walks like a duck nor end ends up being a duck. There have also been…

I live not too far from the area. There was a lot of pressure to call it terrorism early on because this just happened to coincide with a drag show happening in the effected area that Proud Boy members and locals tried to prevent from happening via threats, and a month prior they were harassing people at another drag show in another nearby city. So whether these same people attacked the substations to prevent the drag show from happening is just speculation, they were absolutely terrorizing some people in some way and so far it's the only lead I know of.

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

#163

Post by ivraatiems »

mistermann wrote: post #66
ivraatiems wrote: post #61

It's interesting to try to game out who might be motivated to commit to an attack like this, at the (small compared to the state or country) scale it was at. I think we can rule out any kind of state actor, even if they were acting through a proxy. The risk/reward just isn't there, and this is not a hard attack to plan, so there's no point in carrying out a "test". If the goal were to send a message, well, this just…

> If the goal were to send a message, well, this just isn't going to cut it. The US military will crush you regardless of the status of a power substation in North Carolina. Like they crushed Iraq for 9/11? Finding and crushing someone is easy, finding an actually guilty party that cannot be found is not so easy. Who knows what this is, but some people can see the strategic significance of it.

How are al Qaeda and ISIS doing today?

Also, like I said before... ideologues take responsibility.

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

#164

Post by ivraatiems »

EricE wrote: post #119
ivraatiems wrote: post #61

It's interesting to try to game out who might be motivated to commit to an attack like this, at the (small compared to the state or country) scale it was at. I think we can rule out any kind of state actor, even if they were acting through a proxy. The risk/reward just isn't there, and this is not a hard attack to plan, so there's no point in carrying out a "test". If the goal were to send a message, well, this just…

I think we are being probed. And what it took to restore service is not encouraging if someone motivated decided to have multiple people simultaneously target infrastructure across a wide number of targets. Especially if we happened to be, say, in the middle of a trade war. Shipping all our manufacturing overseas was beyond stupid.

Here's the thing, though: It doesn't take a genius to know US power infrastructure is vulnerable. We've been saying it ourselves for years. This attack was not complex to execute with fairly minimal, publicly available knowledge. Why probe?

I guess to see how long it takes us to fix, but that just... doesn't seem worth it to me. If I were China, say, would I really be willing to attack the domestic United States just to see what the US would do? Don't I have the resources to know what the US would do without trying it?

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

#165

Post by cleansingfire »

HardlyCurious wrote: post #155
grecy wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's easier to attack than defend Interestingly, I'd wager that very little infrastructure in developed countries was designed with any thought of defending it from it's own citizens.

There is no suspects last I knew. We don't know if the perps were 'it's own citizen'.

Statistically they were americans. Foreign terrorists are historically negligible compared to domestic.

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

#167

Post by kerpotgh »

jfengel wrote: post #24
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.

[dead]

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

#168

Post by hatefulmoron »

wereallterrrist wrote: post #138
boppo1 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just very wary of the 'white supremacist terrorism' narrative that politicians and alphabet agencies have been trying to sell lately to justify increases in domestic surveillance/police state infrastructure. And don't get me wrong, I spend plenty of time on 4chan watching this shit, I know there are some truly hateful and dangerous people out there. But It doesn't seem like they're as organized as the narrative w…

>to sell lately to justify increases in domestic surveillance/police state infrastructure. what evidence or even personal narrative do you have to back this assertion? >But It doesn't seem like they're as organized as the narrative would have us believe phew-boy, I don't have any inside knowledge of this because I have other things that keep my attention, but I'm quite sure that there MIGHT be a bit of a infosec/skil…

>There's all this incredulity in this thread but really, some dudes are gonna go knock out an entire power substation to rob a cash register? If I were one for Occam's Razer...

If they're not robbing a cash register, they're white supremacists? Surely that's a leap itself...

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

#169

Post by boeingUH60 »

mc32 wrote: post #5

"Officials have stopped short of calling it an act of terrorism, presumably because we don’t know the motive of whoever perpetrated the act" There was another one elsewhere [Washington state [1]] and they found out the perps did it to facilitate knocking over some business of some sort. So, just because it quacks like a duck does not mean it either walks like a duck nor end ends up being a duck. There have also been…

I really don’t understand this thread…many times on HN, you’ll hear things like Occam’s Razor (follow the simplest explanation), cite official sources, etc.

Here, we have an official report from the prosecutor stating that people attacked substations in furtherance of theft but a lot of people are trying to pin it as part of a larger conspiracy against the government.

Like we should tell conspiracy theorists, the burden is on you to cite the evidence confirming your alleged conspiracy. In absence of that evidence, is it not better to go with the word of the DA, whose job is literally to investigate and gather facts about cases like this?

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

#170

Post by warner25 »

panarky wrote: post #13
mc32 wrote: post #5

"Officials have stopped short of calling it an act of terrorism, presumably because we don’t know the motive of whoever perpetrated the act" There was another one elsewhere [Washington state [1]] and they found out the perps did it to facilitate knocking over some business of some sort. So, just because it quacks like a duck does not mean it either walks like a duck nor end ends up being a duck. There have also been…

Regarding the sabotage in Washington State, it doesn't make a lot of sense to attack four substations simultaneously just to steal from the cash register of a small business. If I fancied myself to be an antigovernment militia leader who had read all the white supremacist literature from the last 40 years that repeatedly describes attacking critical infrastructure like pipelines, telecoms and electricity pylons and s…

Especially with the Washington attack happening so soon after the one in North Carolina, the most notable thing to me was that both attacks occurred close to a couple of our most important Army bases, in counties where many troops live with their families off-base. Fort Bragg and Fort Lewis (JBLM) are both home to a corps headquarters, special operations units, and other rapid-response forces. This was rarely mentioned in the news coverage that I saw. But as a career military officer, some of the most thought-provoking "red team" stuff that I've read involved attacking us in our communities at home where we are soft targets, mostly reliant on civilian law enforcement for protection.
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