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DHS Mistakenly Releases 840 Pages of Critical Infrastructure Documents
wiredmikey (1824622) writes The Operation Aurora attack was publicized in 2010 and impacted Google and a number of other high-profile companies. However, DHS responded to the request by releasing more than 800 pages of documents related to the 'Aurora' experiment conducted several years ago at the Idaho National Laboratory, where researchers demonstrated a way to damage a generator via a cyber-attack. Of the documents released by the DHS, none were related to the Operation Aurora cyber attack as requested. Many of the 840 pages are comprised of old weekly reports from the DHS' Control System Security Program (CSSP) from 2007. Other pages that were released included information about possible examples of facilities that could be vulnerable to attack, such as water plants and gas pipelines.
"Mistakenly" Sure...
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From what the article shows, it seems like a lot of this information is public knowledge - where substations and water plants are and how they operate. Pretty much everyone in my town knows where the local substations are, and it doesn't take a genius to know that an attack that disables or destroys a substation would have a massive impact on the people living there. None of these documents appear to be classified, which means they don't contain anything that DHS was afraid of the general public knowing.
It would be a different story if these were classified documents containing things like the floor plans for nuclear plants and gaps in security at said plants that could actually be useful in an attack, but this seems like a non-story other than that DHS's FOIA officer got lazy and just CTRL+F'd for "Aurora" and blindly copied anything with that word in the name.
that nothing can be kept secret anymore? Whatever you want not to be exposed, whether diplomatic communications or technical documents or "intellectual property", will eventually reach the internet either by whistle-blowing or human error? And once it reaches the internet, if anyone cares about it then it will be perpetuated forever?
There are advantages to such a situation, of course, but also disadvantages.
Er...ya...or something.
Do it in the name of whistleblowing, and your treasonous. Do it 'mistakenly', and it's 'OK'. Just an 'oopsie'. What's the fine, or charge, for 'accidentally' enabling the terrorists again? That's right. Nothing!
Can I get a new Government? Possibly one where incompetence is a disqualification for anything having to do with infrastructure, security, or Civil Liberties?
A honeypot by itself won't be attracting any bee
An advertised honeypot, on the other hand ...
/. says a lot !
and the involvement of
You see, those dept.'s want even more of your money, and what with terrorists keeping quiet these days and the extremists
being ID''ed by whether or not they read Linux Journal, the DHS, TSA, NSA and any other acronym that's got the coveted 'S',
are starting to look pathetic.
Can't have that!
I'd say about half of these are actually spot on. It would be funny to see one for Republicans and Libertarians too.
The requestor obviously was looking for information on the "operation aurora" hacking that occurred in 2010. DHS confused this with the "aurora" vulnerability from 2007 which sought to prove that an ICS attack could break a generator. I think that is all and the 2007 aurora info is long public.
I don't know what human condition you suffer from, but I venture one of its symptoms is typarria.
Gee, shock surprise that the Department of Hardons for Stasiism fucks up like this.
What does any one expect from a newly formed "law" enforcement that supercedes
all other "law" enforcement of the land? It's bound to be full of fuckups and n00bs
who don't know what the fuck they are doing. And this just proves this...
...in a perfect world.
Recall the inadvertent Gmail slip, and the doctor SSN fail ...
Buy then books and send them to school and they bite the teacher.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
This documentation relates to vulnerabilities which were presumably identified about 4 years ago, if they haven't already been fixed they SHOULD be advertised to shame those responsible into fixing them. Its disturbing how often society/government cringes at the "unauthorized" release of information instead of the lack of action & accountability that they so often show.
I vote democrat to (among other reasons) piss people like you off.
Lets start refering to The War Against Terror by it's initials. . .
Were the missing IRS emails in there?
Step one: Release a bunch of 'critical' documents by 'mistake'.
Step two: Twiddle thumbs while terrorists / criminals abuse information released in step one.
Step three: Point to attack in caused by step two, argue that DHS should be exempt from FOI Request because 'national security'.
Step four: DHS can do anything they like without the public oversight.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Now that I've got my flip answer out of the way, it's probably best that I don't leave your little talking points unaddressed.
(UPDATE: Comboman's response is probably wittier and more concise - someone send 'em a gold star please. But I went to the trouble to type all this, so I'm going to post it anyways. It's the internet way.)
I vote Democrat because I believe it’s okay if our federal government borrows $85 Billion every single month.
Yup. Years of neglect have left our infrastructure in a sorry state, inherited wars cost money(!), and let's not even talk about the shitpile that was the economy. When Bush II handed over the reins. (A resounding win for Financial deregulation, wouldn't you say?)
I vote Democrat because I care about the children but saddling them with trillions of dollars of debt to pay for my bloated leftist government is okay.
This is really the same as the last one, but hey, it's still better than inventing evidence and starting a war that result in the deaths of ~4,500 of our kids, and maiming or otherwise injuring ~32,000 more (and totally ignoring the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens as a result of said war).
I vote Democrat because I believe it’s better to pay billions of dollars to people who hate us rather than drill for our own oil, because it might upset some endangered beetle or gopher.
Last I checked, we'd rather reduce our dependence on oil altogether (By jump-starting the wind and solar industries in the US), but big oil and coal has been lobbying like there's no tomorrow to prevent that.
I vote Democrat because I believe it is okay if liberal activist judges rewrite the Constitution to suit some fringe kooks, who would otherwise never get their agenda past the voters.
No worries, the conservatives engage in plenty of this too, especially in cases involving the 2nd ammendment and abortion rights (Hobby lobby decision was decided by 5 men who were conservative Catholics).
I vote Democrat because I believe that corporate America should not be allowed to make profits for themselves or their shareholders. They need to break even and give the rest to the federal government for redistribution.
Dude, you are crazy. No company should be able to avoid paying taxes through financial sleight of hand, but really, you think GE is paying too much tax for the benefits of being an american corporation? Apple?
I vote Democrat because I’m not concerned about millions of babies being aborted, so long as we keep all of the murderers on death row alive.
As opposed to that other party, who preaches the sanctity of life, but is giddy to kill inmates.
I vote Democrat because I believe it’s okay if my Nobel Peace Prize winning President uses drones to assassinate people, as long as we don’t use torture.
Guess what? Most humans don't think that anyone should either engage in torture, or send drones to kill other humans. Shocking! One of two is a reasonable start, and we're working on the other one. At least we don't have Bush/Cheny in charge any more, they were fine with both.
I vote Democrat because I believe people, who can’t accurately tell us if it will rain on Friday, can predict the polar ice caps will melt away in ten years if I don’t start driving a Chevy Volt.
You do know the difference between climatology and meteorology, right? It's like the difference between socialism and communism (or patriotism and fascism, if you swing that way.) The later is a tiny subset of the former.
I vote Democrat because Freedom of Speech is not as important as preventing people from being offended.
Aw, here you're just trying to stir things up. I'm pretty sure the courts have a well-used system in pl
Lets start refering to The War Against Terror by it's initials. . .
There's nothing mysterious about this. The problem is that if someone gets control of circuit breakers for large rotating equipment, they may be able to disconnect it, let it get out of sync, and reconnect it. This causes huge stresses on motor and generator windings and may damage larger equipment. This is a classic problem in AC electrical systems. A more technical analysis of the Aurora vulnerability is here.
The attack involves taking over control of a power breaker in the transmission system, one that isn't protected by a device that checks for an in-phase condition. Breakers that are intended to be used during synchronization (such as the ones nearest generators) have such protections, but not all breakers do.
Protective relaying in power systems is complicated, because big transient events occur now and then. A lightning strike is a normal event in transmission systems. The system can tolerate many disruptive events, and you don't want to shut everything down and go to full blackout because the fault detection is overly sensitive. A big inductive load joining the grid looks much like an Aurora attack for the first few cycle or two.
There's a problem with someone reprogramming the setpoints on protective relays. This is the classic "let's make it remotely updatable" problem. It's so much easier today to make things remotely updatable than to send someone to adjust a setting. The Aurora attack requires some of this. There's a lot to be said for hard-wired limits that can't be updated remotely, such as "reclosing beyond 20 degrees of phase error is not allowed, no matter what parameters are downloaded."
Does anyone have a better link to the document to download and view? The browser on that Muckrock site is supremely annoying.
I vote Republican because I see absolutely no correlation between lenient gun laws and surging crime rates
I'm with you on a lot of this stuff, except for this one which is blatantly false.
"Crime rates have varied over time, with a sharp rise after World War II, before peaking between the 1970s and early 1990s. Since the early 1990s, crime has declined in the United States, and current crime rates are approximately the same as those of the 1960s." (citations in article)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Yes, I was trying to echo the wording of the "Why I Vote Democrat" post as closely as possible (which is also incorrect of course). A more accurate statement would be "surging mass shooting rates".
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