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Water Pump Destruction Not Due To SCADA Hack
knifeyspooney writes "According to the Springfield State Journal-Register, the city's recent public water system failure was not caused by malicious activity. One water district trustee spoke this gem: 'First, they tell us that it's the first instance of cyber hacking in the entire world, and everyone goes nuts. Now, all of a sudden, they tell us it's not.'"
say what? first instance of cyber hacking? are you suuuuuuuure about that?
simple. you tell that it is due to cyberhack. everyone goes nuts, endless number of articles spread throughout internet. then you admit that it wasnt. at this point it is now impossible to change misinformation. the misinformation spreads, public opinion is shaped. you can pass your $OPA act.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/07/11/3265013.htm
http://idle.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/07/14/1235220
Read radical news here
Good morning Mr. Mayor,
this is special agent Smith.
Yes, we'd like you to say the water pump malfunctioned and wasn't hacked.
No, no, I know about the truth, Mr. Mayor, but we don't want the public to be aware of the dangers they are in from exploding water towers and militarised telephone cables... or to encourage copycat hackers.
Yes, yes... just say it was normal wear and tear.
Oh, you're not going to comply?.. are you aware that we have an unauthorised GPS under your car and know what you do Tuesday nights? ... ahh I'm glad you see things our way.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
No. It was a revised statement based on new information. That's still allowed, right?
"How can two government agencies be so at odds at what’s going on here? Did the fusion center screw up, or is the fusion center being thrown under the bus?” commented Joe Weiss, the security expert who discovered the initial Fusion Center report and reported on it. “There’s a lot of black and white stuff in that report. Either there is or there isn’t a Russian IP address in there. It’s hard to miss that."
While I don't think that threats like these are nonexistent, they are still extremely overblown, and the media jumps on them at a moment's notice. My biggest concern is that this could be the beginning of the military industrial complex evolving to exist on the internet.
Yes, but we would prefer if government agencies didn't jump to outrageous conclusions before all the information is gathered.
The three-letter passwords can withstand regular hackers, but noone could expect that the mighty cyberhackers were coming!
As an actual control systems engineer who uses the Siemens Simatic range of PLC/HMI/Servo drives, it doesnt take a two year old who knows how torrents works to download the WinCC flex HMI programming software, throw together a few screens with some built in clipart of pumps and generators and claim he has hacked a city's water supply... or uranium plant, or Area 51 air con system..
I posted this before, but the fight against this conspiracy is not over yet!
Any nerd claiming to wear a tinfoil head is either a wannabe or part of the tinfoil conspiracy!!11! It is so obvious that tinfoil hats might cover you from alleged hostile brain control waves from sattelites thousands of kilometeres awas, but otoh forms a nearly parabolic antenna to the whole communication wires and infrastructure below pedestrian lanes just a couple of meters away. And coincidentally only relevant people will be affected, since only they are likely to wear - wait a minute, there is someone knocking at my door, I will write more. later.
Trolling is a art!
The book is called @Large.
http://books.simonandschuster.com/At-Large/David-H-Freedman/9780684835587 Cuckoo's Egg might be the classic popular text from that era.
http://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionage/dp/0743411463
Their they're doing there hair.
"...detailed analysis by DHS and the FBI has found no evidence of a cyber intrusion or any other malicious activity."
All this means is professional spin doctors were called in as damage control.
First off, there is a cracker out there with screen dumps from another cracked SCADA system. Coincidence? Yeah, right.
Secondly, the compromise was originally believed to have been the result of the SCADA vendor being cracked. Also, an IP address from a Russian source was found. If there was no compromise, I would still really be interested as to why a Russian IP address was found connecting to US infrastructure.
Thirdly, the cracker's pastebin post* sounds quite accurate of the DHS in general:
"...the DHS tend to downplay how absolutely FUCKED the state of national infrastructure is."
* - http://pastebin.com/Wx90LLum
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Whether or not this is was a hack it points to incompetence (in both the original incident and the followup investigation). This is not the first case of incompetence in Springfield's "City Water, Light and Power" division. I recall two weeks in the early 80s where the entire town was ordered to boil tap water before drinking (and avoid getting water in your eyes and mouth while bathing) because of high levels of ecoli contamination. CWLP workers ran around sampling water from all over the system for several weeks before they discovered their own lab was contaminating the samples. Springfield has a commissioner government where elected officials run various departments (Streets, CWLP, others I can't recall) with an elected mayor acting as a figure head. Commissioners are re-elected year after year as long as they *seem* competent and are generally well liked. I always thought it was strange system and I've never seen another local government run this way. I wonder if it is inherently more likely to have catastrophic failures than say, an aldermann/city council/city manager.
I'm not sure about faith moving mountains, but I've seen what it can do to skyscrapers.