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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?

#11

Post by LarryMullins »

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]

Criminal conspiracy is a real sort of thing that actually happens. There's nothing wrong with speculating about such circumstances. If anything, I think hypothesizing that it was a lone wolf attack is more zany, given similar attacks being carried out in other areas.

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

#12

Post by geepound »

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.

They knew enough to shoot a part that is filled with fluid and hard to replace.

They might have lacked the knowledge of "the grid" to make such an attack go beyond one county, but there was some degree of thought put into that attack.

It's easier to attack than defend.

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

#13

Post by panarky »

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 substations to create chaos and ignite the race war, I'd definitely teach my inexperienced acolytes to add a little petty theft to their sabotage to avoid a terrorism enhancement when they're caught probing the defenses and response times of utilities and law enforcement.

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

#14

Post by AmericanChopper »

LarryMullins wrote: post #11
plsksosl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Criminal conspiracy is a real sort of thing that actually happens. There's nothing wrong with speculating about such circumstances. If anything, I think hypothesizing that it was a lone wolf attack is more zany, given similar attacks being carried out in other areas.

Real conspiracies of all different types happen all the time. A conspiracy is just two or more people secretly doing something together. Any speculation about two or more people doing anything is a conspiracy theory. It would typically have to be “something bad”, but that’s really a matter of perspective.

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

#16

Post by s1artibartfast »

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

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

#17

Post by mrtesthah »

JasonFruit wrote: post #4

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

White supremacists think they can incite a race war by accelerating social unrest.

https://www.fpri.org/article/2020/04/the-growing-threat-pose...

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/three-men-plead-guilty-conspi...

Three Men Plead Guilty to Conspiring to Provide Material Support to a Plot to Attack Power Grids in the United States

Domestic Terrorism Plot was in Furtherance of White Supremacist Ideology

Sure, we don’t know about this particular attack, but we know that white supremacist groups have already been committing such crimes and have had longstanding, well-documented and widely-publicized plans to do so.

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

#18

Post by NavinF »

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 actor with a gun"

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

#19

Post by thatguy0900 »

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

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

#20

Post by panarky »

meindnoch wrote: post #15

[flagged]

When there are thousands of pages of evidence that white supremacists and antigovernment militias have been planning for decades to sabotage the electric grid by firing rifle rounds into transformers at substations, and then transformers start getting sabotaged with rifle rounds at multiple substations across the country, and your first thought is to excuse all of that as a "false flag" by law enforcement, with zero pages of evidence, you might consider whether deprogramming is right for you.
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