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Sabotage Blacks Out Millions In Crimea
HughPickens.com writes: In a preview of what the U.S. may one day face with cyberattacks on the U.S. power grid, Ivan Nechepurenko reports at the NY Times that power lines in southern Ukraine that supply Crimea have been knocked down by saboteurs, leaving millions without electricity. Four local power plants, including two nuclear ones, scaled back production because they had no means to distribute electricity. More than 1.6 million people still lacked power on Monday morning, Russia's Energy Ministry said in a statement. Local power plants in Crimea, as well as backup generators, were being used to provide power to hospitals, schools and other vital facilities. The Crimean authorities declared Monday a day off for non-government workers and declared a state of emergency, which can last as long as one month.
It was not immediately clear who destroyed the main electric pylons on Friday and Sunday, but the blasted-away stump of at least one tower near the demonstrators was wrapped in the distinctive blue Crimean Tatar flag with a yellow trident in the upper left-hand corner. Tatar activists blockaded the site, saying they would prevent repairs until Russia released political prisoners and allowed international organizations to monitor human rights in Crimea. The activists claim that the 300,000-member minority has faced systematic repression since Russia annexed the peninsula in March 2014. In the meantime Russia is building an "energy bridge" to Crimea that officials hope will supply most of the peninsula's need and its first phase will begin operating by the end of this year.
Defending the power grid in the United States is challenging from an organizational point of view. There are about 3,200 utilities, all of which operate a portion of the electricity grid, but most of these individual networks are interconnected. The latest version of The Department of Defense's Cyber Strategy has as its third strategic goal, "Be prepared to defend the U.S. homeland and U.S. vital interests from disruptive or destructive cyberattacks of significant consequence."
It was not immediately clear who destroyed the main electric pylons on Friday and Sunday, but the blasted-away stump of at least one tower near the demonstrators was wrapped in the distinctive blue Crimean Tatar flag with a yellow trident in the upper left-hand corner. Tatar activists blockaded the site, saying they would prevent repairs until Russia released political prisoners and allowed international organizations to monitor human rights in Crimea. The activists claim that the 300,000-member minority has faced systematic repression since Russia annexed the peninsula in March 2014. In the meantime Russia is building an "energy bridge" to Crimea that officials hope will supply most of the peninsula's need and its first phase will begin operating by the end of this year.
Defending the power grid in the United States is challenging from an organizational point of view. There are about 3,200 utilities, all of which operate a portion of the electricity grid, but most of these individual networks are interconnected. The latest version of The Department of Defense's Cyber Strategy has as its third strategic goal, "Be prepared to defend the U.S. homeland and U.S. vital interests from disruptive or destructive cyberattacks of significant consequence."
Surely blowing something up is similar to a cyberattack!
"In a preview of what the U.S. may one day face with cyberattacks on the U.S. power grid"
What the hell does physical sabotage have to do with cyberattacks? Who's behind the spin on this story and what is their agenda?
maybe there's something to those guys after all.
>> Defending the power grid in the United States
WTF is with the US utility tie-in? Did California declare war on Nevada overnight? Is the South risin' again?
The problem here is that there's a low-grade civil war brewing in Crimea after Russia's invasion. Wake me up when/if the US has a similar problem. Zzzzzz....
Solar, wind, etc...
Then you can have a highly distibuted generation/distribution system that will be more difficult to disrupt. Not impossible, but more difficult.
Think of the Children in the dark.....
Damn those Sabotage Blacks!
My heartfelt condolences to the millions of GLBT Crimeans they just outed.
Looks like Crimea needs to build more pylons
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
tsss....
So powerlines were struck with explosives, and somehow this may be related to cyberattacks? I think this powercut is preview of what the U.S. may one day face with an alien invasion. Or zombies.
At first I thought it was about grid IP security but things got destroyed by conventional means.
Sabotage Blacks Out Millions In the Ukrainian territory of Crimea
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
You are remembering it wrong. California had almost twice the power generation capacity as it needed. It was Enron and others that took plants offline and manipulated the market to increase the price of energy 800%.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Have gnu, will travel.
Nope....it was Enron.....may they rot in hell...
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
Cutting Crimea off from Ukraine is only going to strengthen Russia's hold on it (especially after Russia comes in to save the day with electricity). And if these people thought they were being repressed before, well, I'd hate to be a Tatar now that they're responsible for turning off everyone's electricity.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
like the goofs who shot up a transformer in California about a year ago. folks in northeast New Mexico that have nothing else to do late at night but take potshots at the high-tension line insulators. these issues are easily but expensively solved by putting the lines underground. as we have seen in New York City, they don't get upgraded on schedule and you tend to have duct explosions and fires.
as soon as they decide to take on the "smart grid" with its 4-character default admin passwords and no firewalling, we then have real issues. laws should make it clear to the utilities that their shareholders pay for that crap.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
There are fewer and fewer journalists, every year.
"all your news is belong to us" (yahoo, facebook, google...)
Yes, I am aware of the irony of using google in my link.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
You are all cows. Cows say Mooo. Moooo! Moooo! Mooo cows Moooo. Mooo say the cows. YOU CIVILIAN CASUALTIES CAUSING COWS!!!
put backdoors in all your servers, guys, let us know about it, and we'll see if you are right that it's not a problem.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
This is one of the most outright blatant trolling attempts by an author of a summary I've seen in at least a week.
and declared a state of emergency, which can last as long as one month.
What happens after one month, then, if the situation hasn't changed? State of Emergency II: Electric Boogaloo?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
"blacks out"? I'm not willing to sit here and silently accept this racism. Slashdot is a hive of white privilege and racism. Now if you'll excuse me, being superior to you gives me a raging hard-on and I need to go crush some pussy.
Tatars gonna Tate! http://24.media.tumblr.com/tum...
Crimea river.
The big lesson learned from the 2008 financial collapse is: fail big. Fail small, you need to pay for the cost of failure. Fail big, feds will pay for the cost of failure. So make sure that all failures are catastrophic, so that there is huge public pressure to "do something". The utilities will have contingency plans ready to hold the hat out for federal handout.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The TV show as responsible. . .
Citations?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Tatars in general — and Crimean Tatars in particular — are, probably, the most secular of Muslims in the world. They are certainly not seeking Sharia and this attack has nothing religious about it — the Tatars' movement is primarily nationalistic, rather than religious in nature. These people hate USSR/Russia with passion over the ethnic cleansing they suffered in 1944. They are quite loyal to Kyiv, because Ukrainian government allowed them to return after gaining its own independence.
The attack was not solely by Tatars either. In fact, it is possible, it was tacitly sanctioned by the government — payback in kind for a "hybrid war", that Russia waged against Ukraine. The government now half-heartedly goes through the motions of trying to "restore order", but the occupiers in Crimea suffer and that's a good thing — the very earth should be on fire under their feet, as we both remember from the WW2-slogans.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Just had to get the "ZOMG TWO nuclear power stations had to do a routine thing and we're all gonna die" angle in.
Seriously?
There are people in Jail over it.
It should not be hard to find 100's of links.
the problem we have now is that the current power system is centralized and interconnected. it's interconnected nature is it's vulnerability so the obvious answer is to segment "the grid". the best answer would be to have everyone use solar+battery and only have people can't generate enough power actually stay connected to the grid.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
LOL, no. Just... no.
Russia signed a treaty in 1994 in which Ukraine transferred all of their nuclear weapons to Russia. One of the stipulations was that Ukraine's borders be recognized by Russia. Russia blatantly violated this treaty, which is why The US and EU administered economic sanctions to punish Putin and Russia. Those sanctions will remain in place until Putin submits, or his people depose him, and Crimea reverts to Ukrainian control.
What does destroying main electric pylons have to do with cyber attacks?
Try calling 1-800-9-Exelon sometime. That used to be their help desk number.
It goes to a porn chat line now.
Why?
The NEW Helpdesk number, which I won't disclose, goes to India.
Yes, Indians, on Foreign Soil, reset the passwords of execs and VP's at whim if the like. In the Phillipines Too by the way.
Government services need to be getting their IT Locally. Period.
And lest we forget Southern California Edison just outsourced their IT Department. Who else? Yep lets outsource our utility infrastructure IT, great idea! This is beyond stupid for the execs to be doing this, it's just greed. Especially with all the rake hikes and linemen making 6 figures with GED's.
I had access to over 10,000 PC's with my local admin credentials. I could've easily loaded something like cryptolocker on every last one of them. I can also go fishing for a domain admin login. Once you are that far in, SCADA networks are not strong enough. Some of the design changes they have made enable you to adjust load with the click of a mouse. Failsafes are in place but what happens if they figure out how to blow a few hundred transformers?
When foreigners have the ability to reset admin passwords, no security is strong enough. There are no criminal offenses.
Corporate Greed makes us weak.
And Mods, leave this up for a week, then delete it. Let their reputation people see it first ; -).
I don't know why Ukraine would even want to sell electricity to Russia, but whatever, I guess Ukraine still has to buy natural gas from them.
"The financial crisis was possible because of partial deregulation legislation instituted in 1996 by the California Legislature (AB 1890) and Governor Pete Wilson. Enron took advantage of this deregulation and was involved in economic withholding and inflated price bidding in California's spot markets."
One trader is heard on tapes obtained by CBS News saying, "Just cut 'em off. They're so f----d. They should just bring back f-----g horses and carriages, f-----g lamps, f-----g kerosene lamps."
"People were talking about market manipulation. People were talking about schemes, people were making jokes," said U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.
The tapes also show that Enron, whose bankruptcy three years ago [article was written in 2005] was the biggest corporate scandal of recent times, manipulated energy markets in Canada and was planning to rig the Californian market even before deregulation in 1998, for which the Texan corporation actively campaigned.
On one tape, an Enron official named Bill tells an employee called Rich at a Las Vegas power plant to take the plant offline on a confected excuse. The conversation took place on January 17 2001, in the last days of the Clinton administration, as blackouts were rolling across California, cutting off electricity to more than one million people, and after the energy secretary, Bill Richardson, had ordered generators across the west to direct their output to the troubled state.
"Ah, we want you guys to get a little creative, and come up with a reason to go down," Bill says on the tape. "Anything you want to do over there? Any cleaning, anything like that?"
"OK, so we're just comin' down for some maintenance, like a forced outage type thing?" Rich replies, according to transcripts published yesterday. "I think that's a good plan, Rich," Bill says. "... I knew I could count on you."
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2005/feb/05/enron.usnews
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/09/business/09ENRO.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/blackout/california/
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/enron-tapes-anger-lawmakers/
Is that enough citation?
Looks more like a KGB action against Tatars, because power cable from Russia mainland is almost ready now.
Their whole corporate existence was emblematic of the modern economy of making money from doing nothing. Buying and selling stuff that they did not own, sitting in the middle and sweeping up profits. They did this with electricity, they had major plans to do this with water (pump it into aquifers in wet years in California then sell it at a profit in dry years), there were rumors they thought about stuff like this with air. Before they were "caught" they were hailed as geniuses in the business world because to the amoral economic leaders in this country they were doing nothing wrong.
A few months back most western governments were screaming at the top of their lungs that these "brave people were taking their government from pro Russians" and now those same people blowing up power lines into an area which voted to a part of the country that overwhelmingly voted to stay with Russia. I wonder if those voices will be nearly as vocal about this act of economic terrorism perpetrated by people they were supporting a few months back.
So, if I cut the telephone lines going into people's houses, is that the same as hacking the telephone network?
If someone is in an auto accident and hits a phone pole, is that the same thing as hacking the car (and subsequently hacking the phone network?) And Horrors! Imagine if the auto accident was because the person was on the phone!
The only way this is similar is if "hackers" knock down the power poles with bulldozers, the old fashioned way. There's no "cyber" anything involved with this story, except in your imagination.
This is a Donald Trump story. This is campaign fodder for his "fear everyone" brand of crap.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
The weather knocks out my power. Would I even notice if it was a terrorist attack?
And why are they "outing" so many people?
Or (more paranoid-ly) did Madam Secretary's script writers get early intel on what Russia planned?
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Gas powered generator is a heck of a lot more practical and more reliable
"In a preview of what the U.S. may one day face with cyberattacks on the U.S. power grid, Ivan Nechepurenko reports at the NY Times that power lines in southern Ukraine that supply Crimea have been knocked down by saboteurs, leaving millions without electricity."
Except the power supply was knocked out by explosives blowing up the pylons and cyberattacks were not involved. And who in this day and age still connects their SCADA units directly to the Internet. Have a look at this from 2003. I do realize bureaucracy moves slowly but this is ridiculous.
Indeed, thank you. And now ask yourself, why was Enron in a position to do all that... And the answer is: monopoly. California bungled the privatisation allowing Enron to hold all (or most) of the cards...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Sabotage Blacks Out Millions In the Ukrainian territory of Crimea
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Ahhh, so that's why my spam is down by 50% today.
Congrats on winning an argument, that wasn't happening here.
Thanks for the comment. However, Koran 9:29 requires Muslims to seek to implement Sharia, sooner or later. That means the Tatars are takfiris (apostates) from the point-of-view of most Muslims in the World (which a 2012 Pew Survey places as having over 800 million people agreeing in one or more aspects of Sharia).
My understanding is that the Tatars have formed a battalion that the Ukranian Government is using. It seems every Government of the World is so corrupt it is prepared to arm and train self-styled jihadis to do their dirty work. This just proves that while Governments are a necessary evil, they are still evil.