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Domestic Terrorists Could Use OSINT To Pinpoint US Substations For a Blackout (darkreading.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A project called 'Gridstrike' found that free and publicly available information can be used to determine the most critical electric substations in the US, which if attacked, could result in a nationwide blackout. Researchers from iSIGHT Partners used a combination of publicly available transmission substation information, maps, Google Earth, and grid congestion documentation, and drew correlations among the substations that serve the top ten cities in the US. They ID'ed 15 substations that if attacked and knocked offline would result in a nationwide blackout, they say. Their research took the spin of whether a homegrown terror group with little funding could get this crucial information. The study was inspired by the 2013 Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) study in 2013 that found that attacks on just nine electric substations in the U.S. could cause a blackout across the entire grid.
That's what you get when you let your critical infrastructure design by entities that care more about profit than providing that critical infrastructure.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Planned attack? It doesn't need that, just a couple of accidents or screw-ups at the same inopportune times. One mistake by a rookie engineer in Arizona took out the grid for most of southern California. One or two more mistakes or equipment failures while they were still trying to recover from the first one could've seen the entire grid west of the Rockies go down. And the main cause is frankly the profit motive: for the sake of efficiency and cost-effectiveness the generation and transmission companies have eliminated the majority of the redundancy in the system and put off expensive maintenance and upgrades as long as the system wasn't failing during normal operation. It wouldn't take a group of terrorists, just a couple of maintenance engineers more interested in getting home for dinner than in following every rule to the letter or system operators who haven't had their morning coffee and are still a bit groggy.