Why haven't the terrorists thought of this?
US Video Shows Hacker Hit on Power Grid
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070927/D8RTGAV81.html
Sep 26, 9:19 PM (ET)
By TED BRIDIS and EILEEN SULLIVAN
WASHINGTON (AP) - A government video shows the potential destruction caused by hackers seizing control of a crucial part of the U.S. electrical grid: an industrial turbine spinning wildly out of control until it becomes a smoking hulk and power shuts down.
The video, produced for the Homeland Security Department and obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday, was marked "Official Use Only." It shows commands quietly triggered by simulated hackers having such a violent reaction that the enormous turbine shudders as pieces fly apart and it belches black-and-white smoke.
The video was produced for top U.S. policy makers by the Idaho National Laboratory, which has studied the little-understood risks to the specialized electronic equipment that operates power, water and chemical plants. Vice President Dick Cheney is among those who have watched the video, said one U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity because this official was not authorized to publicly discuss such high-level briefings.
"They've taken a theoretical attack and they've shown in a very demonstrable way the impact you can have using cyber means and cyber techniques against this type of infrastructure," said Amit Yoran, former U.S. cybersecurity chief for the Bush administration. Yoran is chief executive for NetWitness Corp., which sells sophisticated network monitoring software.
"It's so graphic," Yoran said. "Talking about bits and bytes doesn't have the same impact as seeing something catch fire."
The electrical attack never actually happened. The recorded demonstration, called the "Aurora Generator Test," was conducted in March by government researchers investigating a dangerous vulnerability in computers at U.S. utility companies known as supervisory control and data acquisition systems. The programming flaw was quietly fixed, and equipment-makers urged utilities to take protective measures.
There was no evidence any U.S. utility company suffered damage from hackers or terrorists using this technique, U.S. officials said. But these officials cautioned that affected systems are not routinely monitored as closely as many modern corporate computer networks, so there would be little forensic evidence to study after such a break-in.
Industry experts cautioned that intruders would need specialized knowledge to carry out such attacks, including the ability to turn off warning systems.
"The video is not a realistic representation of how the power system would operate," said Stan Johnson, a manager at the North American Electric Reliability Corp., the Princeton, N.J.-based organization charged with overseeing the power grid.
A top Homeland Security Department official, Robert Jamison, said companies are working to limit such attacks.
"Is this something we should be concerned about? Yes," said Jamison, who oversees the department's cybersecurity division. "But we've taken a lot of risk off the table."
President Bush's top telecommunications advisers concluded years ago that an organization such as a foreign intelligence service or a well-funded terror group "could conduct a structured attack on the electric power grid electronically, with a high degree of anonymity, and without having to set foot in the target nation." Ominously, the Idaho National Laboratory - which produced the new video - has described the risk as "the invisible threat."
Experts said the affected systems were not developed with security in mind.
"What keeps your lights on are some very, very old technology," said Joe Weiss, a security expert who has testified before Congress about such threats. "If you can get access to these systems, you can conceptually cause them to do whatever it is you want them to do."
The Homeland Security Department has been working with industries, especially electrical and nuclear companies, to enhance security measures. The electric industry is still working on their internal assessments and plans, but the nuclear sector has implemented its security measures at all its plants, the government said. In July the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission proposed a set of standards to help protect the country's bulk electric power supply system from cyber attacks. These standards would require certain users, owners and operators of power grids to establish plans and controls.
Hacked, EMP, conventional
Quote:
Originally Posted by AuGmENTor
Maybe the real terrorists HAVE thought of this. Hey dMOLE, how hard would it be to make a machine to generate an EMP big enough to knock shit like that down? (grids and stuff?)
What a monkey wrench THAT would be.
Back in my "salad days" I knew a few compu-tech guys who probably could eventually find the "cracker" way ("hacker" is a misnomer that the MSM perpetuates). Here's a guy that I think could (been incarcerated 5 times already though and has been into DARPA and utilities in the past): Kevin Mitnick
http://www.takedown.com/bio/mitnick.html
http://www.kevinmitnick.com/
EMP: When I'm not tutoring algebra, I'm in the process of teaching myself Quaternion Electrodynamics (it's not on the "approved" reading list at most/any? physics or EE? graduate schools that usually use Jackson's or Landau&Lifshitz' "Electrodynamics", both of which I have skimmed before). I was busy going back to the original sources in their own words, like James Clerk Maxwell and Whittaker's higher-dimensional mathematics, when I got busy with all this 9/11 Truth research. If youse guys/gals would bring some binding indictments on our false-flag criminals in DC, I could get back to "my" research in a Constitutional nation, hopefully on a funded basis so that we can move beyond the oil addiction...
I suspect (and have heard undocumentable reports that) such directionally-focused EMP devices exist in classified DoD inventories as we speak. I vaguely remember seeing something back in the mid-1990s at the USAF website about Air Force one having both EMP shielding and EMP "countermeasures", but it's gone now. USAF now says, "Principal differences between the VC-25 and the standard Boeing 747, other than the number of passengers carried, are the state of the art navigation, electronic and communications equipment"
http://www.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?fsID=131
Here's your scalar field guy: Lt. Col Thomas E. Bearden (retd.)
PhD, MS (nuclear engineering), BS (mathematics - minor electronic engineering), Co-inventor - the 2002 Motionless Electromagnetic Generator - a replicated overunity EM generator
I've got his theory book but not at this location, so I can't start a scalar field (needed for EMP tech) calculation tonight. His website:
http://www.cheniere.org/
Conventional: a well placed shotgun slug or rifle round could knock out some critical substation components, if a theoretical terrorist had the schematics and the knowledge of where to place the shot(s). Alternately, just hijack a city bus like in "Speed" and ram a central power substation, or use an RPG, or a Stinger, or a truck bomb that was blamed for the OKC Murrah Bldg, or...
For the "Junk Science" debunkers
Hi AuG,
Forgot to mention the Russians- they put a LOT more stock in the Tesla work than our mainstream-academicians here in Anglo-America. One of the Soviet leaders told Nixon? of weapons "too terrible to imagine" I believe. For the Tesla-bashers and EMP/"Non-lethal" doubting-Thomases out there, please explain why the Russians would spend all the money to do this in the late 1970s (be sure to scroll down to "150 meters-long lightning":
http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2007...allations.html
I really prefer the Russian page (has scantily-clad mail order Russian brides though)
http://fishki.net/comment.php?id=21722
Scary part is, Russian scientists are likely to work for the highest bidder. Might be time to take a long, hard look at U.S. Foreign Policy and start playing ball with the International Criminal Court and UN (but I'm not a big fan of theirs)
d
