Slashdot Mirror
Chinese Researcher Says US Power Grid Is Vulnerable, Strategist Overreacts
An anonymous reader writes with a story about Wang Jianwei, a grad student in China who recently released a paper detailing a vulnerability in the US power grid. Despite the paper being rather typical for security research, its origin set off alarm bells for military strategist Larry M. Wortzel, who testified before Congress that the student was a threat, despite the fact that the published attack wasn't really feasible. Quoting:
"'We usually say "attack" so you can see what would happen,' [Wang] said. 'My emphasis is on how you can protect this. My goal is to find a solution to make the network safer and better protected.' And independent American scientists who read his paper said it was true: Mr. Wang's work was a conventional technical exercise that in no way could be used to take down a power grid. The difference between Mr. Wang's explanation and Mr. Wortzel’s conclusion is of more than academic interest. It shows that in an atmosphere already charged with hostility between the United States and China over cybersecurity issues, including large-scale attacks on computer networks, even a misunderstanding has the potential to escalate tension and set off an overreaction. 'Already people are interpreting this as demonstrating some kind of interest that China would have in disrupting the US power grid,' said Nart Villeneuve, a researcher with the SecDev Group, an Ottawa-based cybersecurity research and consulting group."
Yes, it would've been much better for this guy not to publish his research so we wouldn't know about this problem and leave it wide open. We should be thanking this man for his hard work, not lambasting him just because he happens to be Chinese.
If the Chinese government were interested in disrupting our power systems, wouldn't they be a little more secretive about their intentions than shouting out our flaws to all the world?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
...to property they're going to legitimately own, thanks to the much slicker trick of rigging their currency exchange rate?
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
OMG, US hegemony is faltering. Your ego takes a hit. What's next? How do you plan to funnel this frustration about china's success? I hope not violence. Buck up Cheeko. Stop whining, ni xue putonghua danshi will be left behind.
From the liberal in the 1950s branded as a commie pinko, to the
19 year old with a 15 year old girlfriend branded as a pedophile, to the
Casual torrent downloader branded as the biggest threat to Hollywood ever, to the
Security researcher branded as an enemy of the state,
we all suffer when people are scapegoated so someone can get his time in front of a microphone.
Would someone please dig up J. Edgar Hoover's body and make sure he's still dead? Methinks his ghost never left us.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Public security research is not a threat. Vulnerable infrastructures that go unchecked are. The trend is to penalize security researchers for publishing their findings will only increase underground security research that will then just be sold to the highest bidder.
I really can't understand this way of thinking. It will probably get me modded down but I ask of you to think about this. What are you afraid of? every time I turn on the tv I see news from the US and every time it is about being scared or about why you should be scared and every time it turns out to be a lie. Why do you feel threatened by a person who is not born in the USA who tells you there is a flaw in your system and goes so far to even tell you all about that flaw.... I don't get it. I just don't get in, I'm sorry.
All power grids are always vulnerable to physical attack. There are few generation stations, relative to the number of customers and many large scale distribution lines. Take those out, and you've disabled power for a long time since they have to be rebuilt. A big, distributed, power grid like we have that does not have tons of excess capacity is just going to be at risk of having large parts taken off line by physical means. Ask anyone who lives in an area of heavy snow.
Now, I understand that an electronic attack could be done remotely, in theory without warning. Ok... To what end? In case people haven't noticed there's a big ole' swath of ocean between the US and China. So if China was to try that as a precursor at an attack, it wouldn't do any good. We'd either already know about the attack, having seen the ships on the way, or it would be way too early, since the ships would take a long time to get here, and it would be back up by the time they got here.
Not that any of that is very relevant to defense. It isn't like aircraft carriers are on the power grid, they've got their own nuclear reactors (2-4 of them in fact). You discover a good deal of important stuff has its own power backup since it isn't like power doesn't go out all the time anyhow. Hell we lose power to our building at work probalby 3-4 times per year, hence there's a generator on critical systems.
I just don't see how this sort of thing is that big a deal. Now please understand, I'm not saying we shouldn't try to secure it. When you find a security hole, you should fix it. Just a good idea over all so you don't have problems in the future. However I don't see it as being a military threat. I see it as being more of a script kiddie type of threat. Some asshole takes power out because they think it is funny. I don't see China trying to knock it out because I can't see how it would be useful, and it would have some rather large negative repercussions if they did and the US found out who was responsible.
The U.S. is reactive and not proactive. The U.S. always has to wait until after the fact to admit that there was a threat. This is nothing new to me. Just read Unrestricted Warfare. The Chinese have been stating this for years now. Yes everything will be fine until the lights go out.
> Every time I turn on the tv I see news from the US and every time it is about being scared or about why you should be scared and every time it turns out to be a lie.
Because the USA is the land of the free and the home of the brave!
And yet his name will probably live forever on a No Fly List. Still, no harm done to you anyway.
The issue of vulnerable power grid is a legitimate threat, but the individual creating a study about it is not. You get it backwards when you say the individual is a threat and paper (or the vulnerability) might be harmless. A grad student won't have capability or interest in taking down US power grid, instances with capability to harm US power grid have also means to create similar study on their own. I'm sure even US military has created similar study and have planned on supplying electricity to critical locations without the electric grid.
There are many valid reasons why US electric grid was chosen to be target of the study. Creating similar risk analysis on Chinese electric grid could be a serious offense in China, or information about US electric grid was more available than any other major electric grid in the world. Most likely this student has interest in working at the electric grids and wants to help to build one that is more secure.
(from his webpage)
The guy is a member and servant of the circle of elites who profit, and enjoy enormous social success from their support of our militarized social and economic system. Pursuading a population of relatively free and relatively educated person to support an political system which can afford to spend $3 trillion dollars (washington post estimate) on an injust, unjustified terrorist war against an impoverished nation, against a dictator we incidentally empowered and supported through the worst of his crimes, and over the objections of its own citizenry, but quails at spending $1 trillion to ensure health care said citizens.
Wortzel enjoys a position of prestige and wealth for his support of the forces of that are destroying us, as do the reporters and editors of the New York Times for parading his observations without the criticism they deserve.
For anyone with a certain amount of research background, or even basic knowledge of network security and stability issues (in this case network in question is power network), the appropriate response to the paper would be analysis, and investigation and applicatoin of measures to improve the stability. The U.S. power grid has in recent years suffered from such cascading network failures several times in the last decade, and we Americans should be grateful that someone is investing the resources to investigate these issues. By publishing his results in a peer reviewed scientific journal, Mr. Wang has done us a service, and deserves our gratitude. Instead he's getting caught up in this policy wonk's latest search for enemies.
since you guys beat the Russians financially I think that is debatable.
We didn't beat them financially. They imploded with a coup de etat. It was an internal affair that the US intelligence community later took credit for orchestrating. Which is part bullshit because if it hadn't have had the support of people within the former Soviet Union to begin with, it never would have succeeded. And I question that we "beat them financially" -- because we've lost in a lot of other areas. International opinion of our country, social services, and other domestic areas. There are large tracts of land in our country that resemble third-world countries economically. Our wealth distribution model is one of the most unbalanced in the world, and we have an entire generation being slaved to the lifestyles of those who are increasingly unable to contribute anything but advice and financial services and rapidly approaching retirement, which will further drain the future of our country, reducing our economic powerbase and status as a world leader.
We won? Hardly.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
So how does having your whole infrastructure go down result in better profits? Your conclusion seems flawed here. Security does in fact fit with capitalism because time is money and if the system goes down for any length of time, money is lost.
The danger is allowing Marxists to run important infrastructure because they won't loose money when the grid goes down.
Whichever country has the "biggest" nuke or even the largest supply of nukes is irrelevant. It only takes a single nuke to completely ruin your day.
Aside from that, this is yet more proof that the terrorists have won. When American people are so skittish, paranoid and scared like this Wortzel fool, there is no other conclusion that can be drawn.
I was thinking more along the lines of "effing great, kill the messenger".
Here's your "enemy" telling you where a critical resource of yours can be attacked. This alone is a boon, not a threat. Assess his attack vector and there are two possible reactions: Either you notice that he is wrong and you keep it at that, hoping that your enemy will believe that this is a feasible way to attack you. When they do, it fails but gives you a the psychologic and diplomatic upper hand. Or he is right and you should get your ass in gear to protect yourself, because now you know how your enemy thinks and how he would execute an attack.
Either way, this is about the best thing that could possibly happen to you.
But leave it to military intelligence to react with ballistic stupidity.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I suspect this is about the military definition of threats.
(Warning: I've worn that particular hat, as a former MI assigned officer in an S2 shop for a cavalry regiment. I've never been a politician, so what you're getting here is definitely only one side of the argument).
The way Military Intelligence is supposed to work, reports consider capabilities, but they deliberately don't consider intentions. MI is never in command and NEVER makes command decisions, but reports to commanders, or at higher levels, to civilian overseers.
For example, an high ranking Army Intelligence officer might be supposed to give the US Congress a good answer to whether country X has missiles with enough range to reach the US. He or she can't give a good answer, and so shouldn't comment, on whether country x has intentions to use them on the US or on someone else (at least unless there's a real obvious 'smoking gun', like the officer has found a copy of the orders where all the missiles are suddenly being retargeted at country Y and the job has to be completed by 1300 hours when "Operation Obliterate Country Y" begins).
It's up to civilian oversight to determine whether a threat (potential) becomes an enemy (actual). The military is not supposed to decide when to go to war, that's the job of civilians. If you want congress or the president to be the ones to decide whether the US needs to go to war or not, you can't have the pentagon declaring in advance who is an enemy and who isn't.
Right now, Great Britain has pretty serious threat potential (They have weapons which could damage the US, and ways to transport them to us). They don't suddenly count as an enemy just because of that. Pakistan has less threat potential (not as many weapons or delivery systems). Imagine a coup puts militant Taliban related forces in charge of Pakistan's nuclear weapons. They might suddenly be classed as an enemy nation, but what happened to the threat assessment? Nothing! They are exactly the same threat, from a Military Intelligence assessment, as before. Same number of bombs and missiles and troops, same threat.
Put that way, a person who can figure out a good way to attack the US is a threat, or a small part of a threat. That he's shared his info with us should make the civilians who are supposed to decide what actions to take figure he's not an enemy, and that any potential threat here is not likely to become an actualized attack. Common sense tells normally rational people that if this person was part of a secret plan that would eventually use his information against us, he wouldn't have mentioned it all publicly. The people he was connected to in China would be unknown to us, not publicly accessible, and so on. But that means any intelligence system which discovered threat potential here probably reported it right, it's just civilian overseers acted like paranoid fools.
For another analogy. Let's say you have two people nearby who can both lift over 300 pounds. They both represent similar threats to you, in the most technical sense. One is there to help you move your furniture, the other is an escaped convict looking for a hiding place. Only one of them is at all likely to attempt to harm you, and it's quite possible he has no intentions against you either. You might classify the mover as an ally, and then it's a judgement call if the convict is an enemy at that point, but both technically have near identical threat potential from what you know. This whole matter sounds like a case where someone is conflating the facts and the conjectures, to try and make people be equally worried about 'moving men' and 'escaped convicts', and then assume the worst possible scenarios are inevitable and not just possible for the convicts as well.
Who is John Cabal?
Actually, I am American, and I love America - enough to have served her armed forces for 8 years, and to raise both a soldier and a sailor. But, I agree with AC. WTF is it with torture? Torture was almost universally condemned throughout the western world, until Herr Shrub came along. FFS, any competent intelligence officer will tell you right out, he can get better results by buddying up to a suspect, rather than torturing him. Offer the guy a cigarette, a beer, ask about his wife and kids, tell him how beautiful his wife and daughters are (even if they are Sumo heavy weights whose faces have been used for dart boards) - sugar catches more flies than vinegar ever did.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I am not only American and love America, I have (almost) always voted Republican.
Gitmo needs to be closed as a detention facility. I'm not even sure it needs to exist as a naval base, but that's a different issue.
The "detainees" are either criminals or they are prisoners of war.
We have rules for dealing with both. A determination needs to be made, one by one, in an expedited manner, which is which, and those rules followed.
If we can't assign a person to either group then maybe they should be released wherever they were captured, with a change of clothes and an apology for the water boarding and genital chewing.
The fact that we are apparently incapable of doing so and would rather continue the water boarding and genital chewing is an embarrassment.
Instead, if the Chicago Tribune is to be believed, we're going to start sending them to Bagram (Afghanistan) instead. (Today's paper, section 1, page 25.)
The whole point of "closing Gitmo" is supposed to be to do the right thing - not to do the wrong thing again, just somewhere else. Some quotes:
From my perspective, that is kind of the point. If the U.S. government is holding someone, that person should have access to U.S. courts, or they should be subject to the Geneva Convention rules. Period.
This kind of behavior is not what the United States is supposed to stand for - it isn't even what we are supposed to tolerate in other countries.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
You, sir, are quite likely a real "Republican", as opposed to the "neoconservative" crowd that is so fashionably popular today.
I salute you. I could almost have been a Republican, because I am a conservative at heart. To bad the party has been hijacked.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Nope. This weekend they showed themselves to be GNAA Trolls.