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Blackout Week Continues
RedCard writes "Back in April of 1999, Wired magazine published an issue featuring a black-on-black cover with the title Lights Out. In it, they detailed what could've happened had the Y2K bug not fizzled. There's the cover story detailing the Y2K worries, a guide to the biggest blackouts of all time (before last week, that is), survival stories from New Zealand, and finally a look at the myth of order - how our power system is as chaotic as any complex software system. By the way, whatever happened to those backups put in place for Y2K that were supposed to prevent one grid from taking out a zillion others? Where'd my tax money go? Enjoy!" Dennis Kucinich has also written an informative piece about the energy utility that seems to have been responsible for the recent blackout.
Here's the clickable German link and here's the translation:
The explanations for the blackout in the USA and Canada were rather incomplete: Lightning supposedly struck a powerplant at the Niagara falls. Following this, the electrical grid collapsed in numerous states.
Nationwide, the connections of a powerplant to the power grid are controlled by a central Grid-Center, to prevent these failures. Normally, it ensures that single regions are quickly disconnected in case of emergency [short circuit, lightning strike etc.] so that the other powerplants can continue as normal. But this time, any protections failed. Resulting from this, the load on the other plants increased, so that they in turn were disconnected as well due to overload, leaving parts of the US without power. Why the measures to prevent a complete failure not worked is still unclear.
Our investigations [Heinz Heise Verlag, publisher of security and IT-news] uncovered the following coincidence: The failed Niagara plant belongs to National Grid USA. This power company is mentioned as a reference customer by Northern Dynamics. This firm calls themselves the "Home of the OPC Experts" and offer a range of products that use OPC for communication with control- and measurement-systems.
OPC stands for "OLE for Process Control" and uses Microsoft's COM/DCOM-Model. This is exactly the technology with the security hole exploited by the W32.Blaster-worm. In a subnet with the worm active, (as enduser got to know at their desktop PCs rebooting regularly) the DCOM-interface fails on unpatched systems and therefore the OPC-system is unavailable, too.
OPC is used for the coupling of so-called SCADA-systems (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), that are employed by power plants. Process data is exchanged between a data center and one or more telemetric sensors. [...]
Because National Grid USA was unavailable for a statement, we can't help but ask the following questions:
- What is the exact usage of OPC at National Grid USA?
- Were there problems with OPC at the time of the blackout? If yes, do they are connected with the W32.Blaster-worm?
Further references mentioned by the "OPCExperts" Northern Dynamics are among others General Electric, Siemens, ABB and the european center for nuclear research (CERN). All this requires investigations.
First of all, anyone who is using "Kucinich" and "clued-in" without a "NOT" in the middle deserves the proverbial grain-of-salt-treatment.
Add to that that your gushing memo is anonymous, and we can only assume that you're one of the twelve people that Kucinich has sucked into his reality-distortion vortex, along with Willie Nelson.
OH, no! We CANNOT blame American management! Those MBAs can't possibly be WRONG! Hold someone, an actually human being, accountable?? But, but they're college educated!!!? I mean, they're MANAGEMENT. They have to know better than the technical people, right?
Is it worth pointing out that here in the UK we have something like 10 times the population density? We also have a strong environmental lobby and some activist organisation. Yet we somehow manage to get the land needed to keep our power grid reasonably solid.
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