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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."
The biggest mistake he made in his paper was the assumption that Homer still works at Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. Clearly China is several seasons behind in their 'research'.
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.
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
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.
> 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!
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.
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?
It's a worry. Power grids use the Internet extensively. Since "deregulation", generating companies and distribution companies are separate businesses, and the generating companies compete with each other. The generating companies make bids, the distribution companies buy from the bids, and the grid operator (a neutral party) keeps the players connected and runs the market. Bear in mind that these systems don't have much excess generating capacity. 12-20% excess capacity during peak periods is typical. For a good overview of how this works, see Background on Generation Control, an online training course from PJM, the biggest grid operator in the world.
Most of the communication between the various players takes place over the Internet. The bid handling is done on machines connected to the Internet and many of the applications involved are Windows-based. The execution of a power buy involves the transfer of a set of switching decisions from the bid-handling machines to the machines which actually have control over generation and transmission equipment.
Details of the PJM Dispatcher Application and Reporting Tool are available. This is the main way generation companies and the dispatch center communicate. The user interface is Flash in a browser. Bid and buy information is shipped around as XML.
If the Internet-based apps go down, they revert to "conservative operation" and stop trying to optimize the economics. All generation facilities, even high cost peaking plants, crank up to at least standby power levels, in case they're needed. Export of power to outside the control area in trouble is stopped. Coordination is over the "all call", a squawk box system, and satellite phones. Worst case, everybody backs down to a preplanned schedule of what they're supposed to be doing at each hour of the day. In this mode, millions of dollars per hour are being lost, but the grid can probably be kept up.
One worry is insertion of bad data into the bid system via the Internet. The California ISO had outages in the early part of the last decade when energy traders put bids into the system which resulted in transmission congestion, forcing the CAISO to buy more expensive power. Back then, California had an energy auction every half hour. That was an extreme of deregulation. Now, the grid manager has more authority; generating companies put up data which offers price/quantity curves as bids, the grid operator takes them in increasing order of cost, and "energy traders" like Enron are no longer involved in hour by hour decisions. So there's more stability in the system.
Internet-based attacks against the control systems are also a worry. There definitely are connections to the external Internet. PJM seems to be using XML, in well-defined formats, to pass data across that boundary. They're not dumb. The problem is making sure that there aren't unwanted connections somewhere amongst the hundreds of different companies which connect to the control side of the system.
It's interesting that PJM doesn't rely on "security through obscurity". Hundreds of thousands of people have to know how this works. So they put the manuals, training materials, and live operational data on the Internet. (Right now, there's a problem near the West Virgina/Ohio border.)
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