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US Electricity Grid Reportedly Penetrated By Spies
phantomfive worries about a report in the Wall Street Journal ("Makes me want to move to the country and dig a well") that in recent years a number of cyber attacks against US infrastructure have been launched over the Internet: "Cyberspies have penetrated the US electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials. The spies came from China, Russia, and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the US electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven't sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war."
You do know that the US penetrated the Soviet pipeline system and has caused industrial accidents with that right?
The time that power goes out most frequently where I live (New York City, Hudson Valley, Syracuse all year round) is during the summer on the hottest days. What is straining the electrical grid so much? Air conditioners. On the hottest days of the summer you will always experience brownouts, and sometimes, the days get to hot that a large section of our part of the country loses power.
Millions of New Yorkers depend on electricity in their daily lives. Prolonged power outages are not only a nuisance -- they are also potentially life-threatening and can cause major economic losses.
Power outages occur most often during the summer months, when residents run air conditioners and power usage is at its peak.
http://www.nyc.gov/html/oem/html/hazards/utilities_power.shtml
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Blackout_of_2003#Causes
The 2003 Northeast blackout was caused by urban sprawl interacting with silvan areas. On hot days, wires can cause fires, especially when tree branches are resting on the electrical wires because we decided running power lines through wooded areas was good decision.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_york_blackout#Cause
Lightning can also cause fires, especially on hot days, resulting in damage so great that major areas like NYC lose power for an entire day. For this blackout there were three lightning strikes that took out power lines causing major damage to NYC's power supply.
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The Wall Street Journal should be ashamed for printing such ridiculous and manipulating propaganda. Major power outages happen entirely because of over consumption of electricity during the hottest days of the years. There is no global anti-American electrical conspiracy that is possibly going to be more damaging than mother nature (lightning, fire) and human nature (needing to be cool on hot days aka mass air conditioner use).
Last year, a senior Central Intelligence Agency official, Tom Donohue, told a meeting of utility company representatives in New Orleans that a cyberattack had taken out power equipment in multiple regions outside the U.S. The outage was followed with extortion demands, he said.
In a chilling scenario reminiscent of James Bond and other action spy movies, the CIA has confirmed that Internet attackers have succeeded in compromising power grids outside the US in order to hold entire populations to ransom while make extortion demands. The utilities infrastructure security meeting was organized by information security training, certification and research group the SANS Institute and was held in New Orleans last week.
US Central Intelligence Agency senior analyst Tom Donohue told a gathering of 300 US, UK, Swedish, and Dutch government officials and engineers and security managers from electric, water, oil & gas and other critical industry asset owners from all across North America, that "We have information, from multiple regions outside the United States, of cyber intrusions into utilities, followed by extortion demands." Mr Donohoe was not explicit as to whether the extortionist cyber attackers, which had brought down the power of entire cities, were terrorists with political motives or were criminals attempting to extort financial ransom. He also did not name the regions that had suffered attacks other than to say they were outside the US. "We suspect, but cannot confirm, that some of these attackers had the benefit of inside knowledge," said Mr Donohue. "We have information that cyber attacks have been used to disrupt power equipment in several regions outside the United States.
In at least one case, the disruption caused a power outage affecting multiple cities. We do not know who executed these attacks or why, but all i