Massive Power Outages In Brazil Caused By Hackers

Hugh Pickens writes "CBS reports on 60 minutes that a massive two-day power outage in Brazil's Espirito Santo State affecting more than three million people in 2007, and another, smaller event in three cities north of Rio de Janeiro in January 2005, were perpetrated by hackers manipulating control systems. Former Chief of US National Intelligence Retired Adm. Mike McConnell says that the 'United States is not prepared for such an attack' and believes it could happen in America. 'If I were an attacker and wanted to do strategic damage to the United States, I would either take the cold of winter or the heat of summer,' says McConnell, 'I would probably sack electric power on the US East Coast, maybe the West Coast and attempt to cause a cascading effect.' Congressman Jim Langevin says that US power companies need to be forced to deal with the issue after they told Congress they would take steps to defend their operations but did not follow up. 'They admit that they misled Congress. The private sector has different priorities than we do in providing security. Their bottom line is about profits,' says Langevin. 'We need to change their motivation so that when see vulnerability like this, we can require them to fix it.' McConnell adds that a similar attack to the one in Brazil is poised to take place on US soil and that it may take some horrific event to get the country focused on shoring up cyber security. 'If the power grid was taken off line in the middle of winter and it caused people to suffer and die, that would galvanize the nation. I hope we don't get there.'"

Comments

Hit'em in their wallets

[Bananatree3]

"Congressman Jim Langevin says that US power companies need to be forced to deal with the issue after they told Congress they would take steps to defend their operations but did not follow up. 'They admit that they misled Congress. The private sector has different priorities than we do in providing security. Their bottom line is about profits..."

Exactly right, this is a capitalist society, ran on making money. If they won't integrate safety systems to protect the system properly from hacker attacks, hit them in the wallet, hard. Pass sound regulation to force them to implement safeguards, require inspections/audits that they are done, not just take their BS word for it. If all they give you is hot air and no implementation, fine them millions of dollars, and on a regular basis if needbe til they implement it.

Re:Hit'em in their wallets

[betterunixthanunix]

Of course, what you libertarians fail to mention is that the banking sector was regulated for decades following the great depression, which had been largely caused by banks, and that we then deregulated the banks, which unsurprisingly led to this current catastrophe. The government has, once again, been forced to clean up after a bunch of private banks nearly ruined the entire country; yes, the government does a better job managing the banking system than the bankers themselves do. Nobody is talking about a complete takeover of the banks, just enough oversight and regulation to prevent them from destroying our economy.

The government regulates the energy sector, and look at what we have: a system that has not imploded on itself, the way the banks nearly did. Sounds like a pretty solid strategy to me -- and given the attacks in Brazil, it sounds like the government should add some new regulations to the list for energy companies, in the interest of national security.

Re:Hit'em in their wallets

[maxume]

Credit card companies push the consequences of fraud onto stores and such. Those stores that choose to accept credit card payments factor the risk of fraud into the prices they charge. The credit card companies do attempt to protect their customers from fraud, but only because they wouldn't make any money if they didn't have any members (they also work with stores to prevent fraud, as they figure it will lead to clearing more transactions).

The credit card companies certainly don't pay for fraud though.

Security

[Renraku]

Most systems here in the US are only secure because they're obscure. Someone who has worked in the industry for more than about a year has enough knowledge to cause some widespread destruction. Up until recently, the emergency broadcast service was only a phone number and modem, with no authentication!

California power embargo of 2000/1

[0WaitState]

'If the power grid was taken off line in the middle of winter and it caused people to suffer and die, that would galvanize the nation

So the enron-organized power embargo hitting california in the summer of 2001 is now being recognized as terrorism? The central valley and inland empire areas hit 100+ degrees most summer days. Wonder how many elderly died, or had their lifespans shortened due to heat stress during the rolling power outages.

No Security

[Anonymous Coward]

Up until recently, the emergency broadcast service was only a phone number and modem, with no authentication!

The CATV company I work for had a crazy insecure ebs system. It was these ancient boxes in the head ends that just watched for a carrier on a certain freq in the return path. Once it saw any carrier it would flip over the EBS system and all the audio on our analog channels would go down. This carrier came from another dumb box that was in the main head end. That box was triggered by a unsecured phone line and all you needed to do was know the number to it. All anyone needed to spam 250K customers was a telephone.

The whole system looked like it was built by some ham radio op with parts from RadioShack in the 1980's.

We only got rid of this system LAST YEAR after some prankster with a signal generator figgered out how to trigger one of the dumb boxes. We now have a new system with scrolling text across the screen and clear audio... though I wouldn't be surprised if it was just as half assed as the old system.

Im posting this AC because coworkers know my /. nick :)

Re:Good luck with that

[jeffstar]

there's the attitude: There is always somebody out there smarter than you, and there is always going to be a bug or security vulnerability somewhere in the system.

There was an interesting blog in the economist magazine pondering what else could be done with the 680 billion the US spends annually on defense.

While the US has spent a trillion in Iraq the chinese have spent a trillion improving their infrastructure.

If the power grid is so vulnerable, why hasn't...

[swb]

...it been taken out in the U.S.?

If there's a dozen guys pissed off and zealous/brave/willing/stupid enough to hijack planes and fly them into buildings, surely there's 100s more pissed off guys with m@d sk1llz who could do this, and wouldn't be held back because it's not a suicide mission, and doesn't directly burn thousands to death in an ensuing fire and crash.

And I'd wager that hacking the power system is probably a decidedly less resource-intensive activity than even small-scale physical attacks (bomb/gun/kidnapping/etc), the participants can engage in almost total anonymity, and there's no messy explosives/weapons to buy or store or get caught with. All this means its something that even a lone crank could pull off, opening the doors to a whole panoply of groups with gripes, including or especially all manner of domestic crackpots. You don't need Al Quaalude or zillions of dollars or a complex intelligence network.

Forcing the grid offline and in a way that kept it down/brain damaged for any length of time over 48-72 hours, especially if it was widespread, would have such a cascading effect and probably spawn anarchy. At a minimum billions lost, thousands killed, possibly riots or widespread civil disorder. Katrina times 9/11. So the effect would be substantial and easily deniable, making it the kind of thing China or Russia or any other competitive major power might want to do just to fuck with the Americans and keep them off balance.

Yet it hasn't happened here or Western Europe or most modern Asian countries. Why?

Re:guess what's next ?

[tuomoks]

You hit the problem for today - the social engineering, how the command hierarchy works and that's much more dangerous than any "computer" virus or whatever. I have worked on nuclear power, stock exchange, banking (even Swiss!), military, public safety, hospital, etc environments and they used to have "fail safes" against this kind of problems - now, today, those "fail safes" are often disabled because of business, profits whatever? And it's scary!

Enron couldn't be possible 20 years ago, at least not in environments, countries and corporations I was working at that time, too tight security / control but today?

Anyhow, back to the original subject, the technology is there - it was there in 80's when I was involved to some nuclear / power control systems. Is the knowledge / will there today is another question. Almost seems that this "maximizing profits" is even accepting the problems (for public) as long as the business can make more?