DHS To Review Report On US Power Grid Vulnerability

CWmike writes "The US Department of Homeland Security is looking at a report by a research scientist in China that shows how a well-placed attack against a small power subnetwork could trigger a cascading failure of the entire West Coast power grid. Jian-Wei Wang, a network analyst at China's Dalian University of Technology, used publicly available information to model how the West Coast grid and its component subnetworks are connected. Wang and another colleague then investigated how a major outage in one subnetwork would affect adjacent subnetworks. New Scientist magazine reported on this a week or so ago, and the paper has been available since the spring."

Comments

Don't worry

[dedazo]

The US power grid is so ancient, convoluted and in such a massive state of disrepair that we can be sure we're safe from terrorists. They wouldn't even know where to begin to find a point in the system that could be used to trigger a catastrophic cascading failure like the one in the East Coast a few years ago.

Trees on the other hand... trees are truly evil.

Re:Don't worry

[Saliegh]

Everyone knows that a small thermal exhaust port at the end of a long trench is the key to initiating a catastrophic cascading failure.

Re:Don't worry

[LoRdTAW]

Have you watched the History Channel special: The crumbling of America? Well if you did the "terrorists" have nothing to worry about, they just have to sit by and watch us fall apart.

The roads are shot along with bridges. Sewer systems overloaded, water supplies in jeopardy, levies and dams in a state of serious disrepair. And an electrical grid that teeters on the edge of blacking out every day.

Its wasn't all doom and gloom as its not too late. Th1ere are many technological advances to replace and update our infrastructure with better and longer lasting replacements. Problem is money, there is simply not enough to go around and in some cases there is no money at all.

Re:not attacked via the web

[Finallyjoined!!!]

Obviously, you have not read TFA:

News about Wang's research comes at a time when there are considerable concerns about the security of the U.S. power grid. In April, The Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous national security officials, reported that cyberspies from China, Russia and elsewhere had gained access to the U.S. electrical grid and had installed malware tools that could be used to shut down service. Though the access hasn't been used to disrupt service, the concern is that the malicious hackers could do so with relatively short notice during a time of crisis or war.

What a prawn.

The amazing thing

[guruevi]

The amazing thing is that nobody ever tried it or at least never succeeded. The US is apparently not that hated in the world since nobody ever does anything. We have hundreds of reports on how easy it would be to disable this or take that out of service. All it takes to black out the USA are some well placed charges or for somebody to hit a few poles hard enough but nobody does it. All we got was some measly hijacked plane (which has been done since the 70's) in a few buildings.

Re:The amazing thing

[oodaloop]

All we got was some measly hijacked plane (which has been done since the 70's) in a few buildings.

...whose cost rose into the tens of billions and exacerbated our recession. It didn't topple our economy, which was their aim, but put a dent in it.

Re:The amazing thing

[Ron Bennett]

People have tried blowing up / cutting high-tension power towers, but it seems that either they're stopped part way through their plan, or simply never follow-through (ie. cutting one or more of the tower supports, but failing to taking down the line).

Very often attacks are attempted at night, but that's a bad time, since load is often low. One would need to wait until mid afternoon on a very high load day (even more ideally when some major lines are down for maintenance) - that takes advanced planning and good luck.

Furthermore, cutting lines, alone, probably wouldn't be enough to cause a cascade. One would very likely need to bypass / overwhelm (ie. in the 2003 east coast black out some of the monitoring computers were unresponsive due to a worm going around) some of the safety systems, as well, for a cascade failure to occur.

On a related note, detonating a nuclear device high in the atmosphere at the right location would likely do it, but that would be extremely challenging - more likely, a terrorist with a nuke, probably of very low yield, would most likely detonate it at ground level, which would minimize EMP effects.

Ron

Re:The amazing thing

[hoggoth]

> It didn't topple our economy, which was their aim, but put a dent in it.

Yes it did. The cost of the buildings is negligible compared to our GNP. But the cost of the followup war in Afghanistan, war in Iraq, DHS, etc have toppled our already shaky economy. What's more their aim wasn't to topple our economy, it was to ruin our way of life. I'd say our descent into security theater, torture, surveillance and paranoia has gone a long way towards destroying our way of life. America the free?

Re:The amazing thing

[dkf]

But the cost of the followup war in Afghanistan, war in Iraq, DHS, etc have toppled our already shaky economy.

Actually, it was the collective stupidity of millions of people that did that. And yes, believing that house prices would always go up in real terms (or that you'd at least be able to guarantee to get out without burning yourself when they stopped) is most certainly stupidity. On the other hand, as long as everyone believed, it almost worked; the only problem was this inconvenient thing called reality...

Re:Power Station PLCs should _not_ be connected...

[Shakrai]

you don't stop flying just because airplanes can crash.

No, you stop flying because you don't like having to bend over to get through the TSA security theater. Sorry, random offtopic rant because I just got back from a flight....

Fragile Grid

[Old VMS Junkie]

The electric grid has already suffered multiple cascading failures from simple events that led to widespread outage. Look into the West Coast outages of 1996 and 1998 as well as the failure in the Northeast in 2003. There's a lot of interesting science going on around networks, graph theory, complexity and all. There's a really good book on teh subject, "Six Degrees" by Watts.

oh noes

[Lord Ender]

if terra were to plant a nuclear bomb in my apartment, thousands in my neighboorhood could be killed. that's worse than a mere blackout! please give me a large grant so i can upgrade my apartment to a more secure version. think of the children!

This just in...

[It doesn't come easy]

Jian-Wei Wang has just been added to America's Top 10 Most Wanted Terrorist list, according to a DHS spokeperson. "We believe this person has been studying some of our infrastructure with the intent to identify inherent weaknesses. It is only a matter of time before this person, or someone else, uses the knowledge gained to attack the USA." A few moments later, a nearby open microphone caught the DHS official's candid statement "Anyone using information, public or private, to point out our own stupidity is automatically suspect. To go so far as to publish their findings is criminal. Besides, since we can't find any real terrorists, we have to demonize someone so we can continue justifying our astronomical budget in these difficult economic times." After a reporter on the scene brought this admission to the attention of the spokesperson, the reporter's name was also added to the list.

Re:not attacked via the web

[ParanoiaBOTS]

Obviously you didn't read the article. They're talking about cascading failures due to the fact that they're connected via the electrical grid. Basically the same thing that happened some years back on the eastern seaboard, but on the west coast and triggered on purpose.

Obviously, you have not read TFA:

News about Wang's research comes at a time when there are considerable concerns about the security of the U.S. power grid. In April, The Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous national security officials, reported that cyberspies from China, Russia and elsewhere had gained access to the U.S. electrical grid and had installed malware tools that could be used to shut down service. Though the access hasn't been used to disrupt service, the concern is that the malicious hackers could do so with relatively short notice during a time of crisis or war.

What a prawn.

Actually both you, and your parent post are correct. They are pointing out why the compromised grid is so concerning(aside from the obvious). Couple that malware with this knowledge and you can very effectively take out power for the west coast by targeting a very small subset of stations.
What they are saying is that the outage like we had several years back can be triggered fairly easy, and even scarier, since we are compromised already, someone sitting at a computer could probably just turn off power for all the west coast.

Re:not attacked via the web

[geogob]

Everyone knows that you hack a power grid system with a modem, weird command line interfaces using pseudo-english commands and some fast random typing on a keyboard.

Re:not attacked via the web

[hoggoth]

Jeez. Please read the article before posting. The article states that power company officials have found very small Chinese people hiding in cabinets inside 75% of our power stations. The situation is very precarious.

Re:Power Station PLCs should _not_ be connected...

[AB3A]

Not so fast. See the first paper in this bunch. The authors managed to hack a Koyo and AB PLC Ethernet interfaces. The AB Ethernet card had lots of useful stuff in it, including a symbol table. From the symbol table I saw many backplane calls that you could use to communicate with the PLC. How well do you trust a hacked Ethernet module on a PLC backplane?

Having a physically separate port is nice, but it is no substitute for secure coding. If you think that coding is poorly secured in the PC world, you'll be shocked at what often gets done in embedded system coding.

Some PLCs and Variable Frequency Drives have been noted for their inability to handle Denial of Service traffic. I've seen that demonstrated myself. This is the official cause of a reactor SCRAM at Browns Ferry a few years ago.

Try a port scan of your PLC some time and tell me how many ports it responds to (DO THIS ON A TEST-BENCH --NOT PRODUCTION EQUIPMENT!). If you can identify everything that critter responds to, congratulations. If not, be afraid. Be VERY afraid. I've heard quite a few PLC models that have mysterious responses to ports where you wouldn't expect them to respond.

Real Time embedded systems are not good candidates for direct internet exposure. They're too difficult to patch in a timely fashion. Often the windshield time alone is prohibitive. And if you have any notions of pushing patches to them remotely, remember, these things control some pretty high speed/high power processes. You don't just patch them. There are process and safety implications that you need to consider. This ain't some office application where you can say oops and restore from a backup. Real physical things will happen and real physical problems will be created that you can't clean up with a simple code reversion.

Most of our infrastructure today has not been engineered with security issues in mind. There is still lots of Gee Whiz "Let's Share Data" synergy crap going on. This leads to all sorts of direct interconnections that aren't absolutely necessary. Many controls can be made over links that weren't intended for that purpose. It's not easy to split the data flows up any more because many organizations have been very profligate with their use of SCADA information and it isn't easy to find all the sources and sinks.

I'd love to post data from a PLC directly to the public. But I just can't sleep at night with something like that waiting to screw things up.

Good luck with your security, and I mean that quite sincerely.

Re:not attacked via the web

[thynk]

Hack the Gibson!

Re:All the more reason to renew the grid

[Ungrounded Lightning]

There were economic issues with Edison's ideas. The biggest problem was his insistence with DC. DC only worked with local power stations. AC scaled and could transmit over much farther distances with much less loss. More fault tolerant, perhaps. More scalable? Not from an economic standpoint.

The main reason AC scaled better than DC was that simple transformers could be used to boost the voltage or long-distance transmission on affordable diameter wire and back down to what could be safely handled in a home. Shifting DC, at the time, required rotary converters and was limited in voltage by the arcing and size of the commutators.

Since about the 1960s or so DC conversion for long-lines has been practical. And with modern semiconductors it's now economically competitive. With that, DC lines become practical for a makeover.

AC, unfortunately, introduces propagation timing effects that make things a bit more complex to keep running. DC doesn't have those failure modes AND it makes somewhat better use of a given amount of metal in the wire.

(A downside of DC vs AC is that a DC arc is harder to extinguish.)

Re:not attacked via the web

[beckett]

SUPPPLIES!!!!

Re:Power Station PLCs should _not_ be connected...

[vtcodger]

***you don't stop flying just because airplanes can crash.***

I expect that you would stop flying if any sociopathic teenager in Belgrade or Sendai could crash your plane from his bedroom with fifteen keystrokes. Would it be rude to point out that cyber security is a disaster area and the situation seems to be deteriorating, not improving?