Coincidence.
Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco
51–60 of 77 posts
Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco
#52Crazy conspiracy theory: the Chinese and/or Russians have most likely already compromised our power grid and other infrastructure control systems and are waging covert economical war by disrupting important services.
It's a valid hypothesis and not crazy at all. If this were random I'd expect totally random cities, not the three most economically significant. It might not be covert economic warfare, but more of a covert demonstration whose audience is intended to be the US government. "We have lots of dangerous 0-days, and there's a lot more where these came from." In that case public credit would never be claimed. It reminds me…
Could be a digital weapons test.
Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hanlon's Razor is not an established law of reasoning or of philosophy. Quoting it is not a valid counter argument without additional reasoning given.
Of course not, it's a colloquial heuristic. Do you disagree with this comment though? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14168483
No. But it does not apply in this case. It may turn out to be coincidence or stupidity but claiming that it is likely to be thus because of Hanlons Razor is wrong and bad thinking.
Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
It'd be pretty easy to trigger a substation fire by feeding lower values into the voltage sensors than how much was actually flowing. Similar to how Stuxnet faked the values it was overriding so that everything seemed normal when in reality the centrifuges were spinning out of control. As another commenter pointed out, it's just keeping an open mind...
Could you explain this further? I'm not sure how innacurate voltage readings would cause a fire...
I believe the idea is, you make the monitoring values read too low (lower than the actual voltage in the wires), so the automatic control system adjusts by making the voltage higher. If you can get it to make the real voltage higher than the equipment can safely handle, you may get a fire.
Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
It'd be pretty easy to trigger a substation fire by feeding lower values into the voltage sensors than how much was actually flowing. Similar to how Stuxnet faked the values it was overriding so that everything seemed normal when in reality the centrifuges were spinning out of control. As another commenter pointed out, it's just keeping an open mind...
Could you explain this further? I'm not sure how innacurate voltage readings would cause a fire...
I'll take a stab at it. I'm not an electrical engineer but I do have some experience with industrial control systems.
From Wikipedia: "Generally substations are unattended, relying on SCADA for remote supervision and control." These SCADA systems may or may not be connected to Internet, which could allow an attacker to remotely access and modify the code that controls transformers and other electrical equipment.
In another comment, someone mentioned the power company was, in this case, pumping C02 into the substation in order to contain smoldering electrical insulation. This means that, most likely, the copper conduit heat up beyond defined tolerances. This could be due to more current being carried than those conduits are rated for. Normally, the SCADA system would be responsible for keeping these currents within tolerances. What I am saying is that they could deliver a payload to the PLCs via the SCADA that could trick the transformers into taking more load than they could handle.
Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco
#56Anyone else read ted koppel's book?
Yea, came here to post about it. Was a riveting read with some great interviews. It being Ted Koppel, he got access to some really high placed people. [1]
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/books/review/lights-out-b...
Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco
#57Crazy conspiracy theory: the Chinese and/or Russians have most likely already compromised our power grid and other infrastructure control systems and are waging covert economical war by disrupting important services.
This recent USA Today article claims our grid is attacked every three to four days:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/03/24/power-grid-ph...
As mentioned in another comment, Ted Koppel's book "Lights Out" is a really fascinating read on the threat.
Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco
#58Crazy conspiracy theory: the Chinese and/or Russians have most likely already compromised our power grid and other infrastructure control systems and are waging covert economical war by disrupting important services.
The biggest part of that economic war would be letting everyone know the grid has been compromised, not the actual outage, there's no advantage to keeping it secret.
But the downside to making it public is you'll galvanize the victim nation to start taking computer security more seriously, and your window of opportunity will start to close. It would make sense to try to "boil the frog" and gradually and slowly increase the frequency and severity so that by the time you "find" the threshold that snaps the victim nation out of their slumber, you've gotten away with a lot of damage cumulatively.
Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco
#59I lived in NYC during the 2001 blackout. It was the first power outage since 1977. The lights don't go out in NYC...it's a really big deal when they do.
Meanwhile, if you read the subway service advisories, there's always some sort of issue causing delays. I saw the notifications about the power outages today and thought absolutely nothing of it. If the entire system went offline, that's kind of a big deal. But it's one station without lighting.
Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco
#60The seeming reluctance to spend lots of money on infrastructure maintenance and modernization really worries me, especially when I read these kinds of stories.
Isn't this a self-correcting problem? The grid will become more robust when there is an economic need to do so.
Only if there's an immediate feedback-loop. (As in a AI-run dictatorship.) In practise this kind of feedback can take up to a decade to cause actual implementation in most democracies, I would guess.