Spies Penetrate Electrical Grid

[Ron61]

This I just saw on the news. Not sure just how many things they have found.

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/200904...yberattack_usa

Ron

[Ronbo]

I've been working with these systems since the early SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) types of the mid-'80s. At that time it was either leased lines or radio linked. The electric companies usually ran low frequency carrier signals over the power lines themselves, as well as railroads using the track rails on some systems.

Throughout the late '90s these migrated to IP based protocols that were somewhat standardized by Johnson controls and Siemens. This eliminates the safeguards of isolation and proprietory signalling formats that the old stuff had.

The Utility industry is well aware of this issue for some years and the systems are being updated to secure them. Kinda like the nightmare that Microsoft went through when "always on" DSL and cable inernet service became commonplace as opposed to dial-up.

Since it involves hardware changes to some rather pricey stuff it won't happen overnight, but it's also not as bad as the end of the world picture the press always tries to paint.

[Ronbo]

Also most of these systems have local control over-rides so it's not like some hacker can make a power plant shut down or blow up. Even something as basic as a sewage lift station would need about three things to fail before you get sewage backing up your drains. I have seen this happen but usually it just floods the street through the manholes.

A nuclear power plant has a minimum two back-up systems as well as scrambling and containment. Three mile Island demonstrated how well containment actually works.

The fact that someone actually highjacked a plane armed with box cutters is of more concern to me.

[Ron61]

Actually it isn't the idea they maybe could cause some disruptions is certain areas that bothers me. It is the fact they could get in there in the first place to plant those programs. Of course our Govt. has some super hackers doing the same thing to all of the other countries. Just like a few years ago when they discovered that a foreign Govt. had planted a spy program in the secret military computers at a classified fort where they had a helicopter squadron and were getting copies of all the orders that went through the system. Should have just kept quite and started feeding phony data through that system,

Ron

[Ronbo]

Yep, we did that when I was in the Navy. The secure channels were flooded with bogus traffic just in case the daily key code got compromised. (not to mention de-cyphering Radioman speek, which looks scambled anyway)

The real critical stuff when over a spread-spectrum system with sync'ed random number generators that used 5yr long patterns. (some extra-terrestrials that worked for Harris took about ten years to come up with this thing)

Although that butthead Walker compromised almost every piece of crypto we had in the 80's, mostly it was the old frame-based stuff that needed to go anyway.