Slashdot Mirror
Are Squirrels A Bigger Threat To Our Critical Infrastructure? (bbc.com)
"The real threat to global critical infrastructure is not enemy states or organizations but squirrels, according to one security expert." Long-time Slashdot reader randomErr quotes the BBC.
Cris Thomas has been tracking power cuts caused by animals since 2013... His Cyber Squirrel 1 project was set up to counteract what he called the "ludicrousness of cyber-war claims by people at high levels in government and industry", he told the audience at the Shmoocon security conference in Washington. Squirrels topped the list with 879 "attacks", followed by birds with 434 attacks and then snakes at 83 attacks.
Those three animals -- along with rats -- have caused 1,700 different power cuts affecting nearly 5,000,000 people .
Those three animals -- along with rats -- have caused 1,700 different power cuts affecting nearly 5,000,000 people .
Were these RUSSIAN squirrels?
The world needs to know!
Build tremendous walls to protect our infrastructure and make the aminals pay for it!
Squirrels and birds are never going to scare the public to the point of feeling good about hundreds of billions in spending, or freely abandoning long-cherished rights.
Rule 35 of the internet: "If it can be hacked, it will be". - Charles Stross
How dare you criticize squirrels on this day of all days. They are a vital part of our culture and history.
Why are so many Trump supporters gay?
Power cuts by drunks running into utility poles? Or idiots shooting out power transformers and insulators? And backhoe operators who don't call first to check for buried utilities?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Why are the other animals not attacking? What is moose up to?
.. cause far more outages and damage. Squirrels merely live in trees. Blame the trees.
The number of deaths due to nuclear weapons, as a fraction of total deaths, is very small as well.
how can you patch holes if no see code?
Best Korea cartoons present westerners as slimy weisels and such.
We need cyber countermeasures to deduce how these squirrels conduct their missions and how we can short circuit their diabolical plans.
Squirrels are just a cost, not a threat. They don't coordinate to attack all at once like a hacker group or hostile country would do. They'll never take out the whole country at once.
Water vapor combustion products from power plants stays in the atmosphere, condenses and forms ice that downs power lines.
It's a vicious cycle. So....more funding for climate change studies.
I think Mother Nature should be nuked first
If only we could have a huge fleet of small, autonomous predator drones to take out these nut jobs wherever they find them.
Something like a Global Hawk, Eagle or Talon, but smaller and more numerous.
If only.
Think, think, think.
Are BIGGER squirrels a threat to our infrastructure
A squirrel climbed under the engine of mark during a storm. It chewed through one of the wires. It cost me around $7K to fix it, because the engine and everything else had to be taken out. We should take the war to them before they sand us back to stone age.
They are frightening because they make no sense, because of the utter disarray of their existence. “They run around the floors like they’re on crack, and then they die,” he said. “They’re freakin’ crazy, man.” link: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12...
We all know that our power grid is the most vulnerable parts of our infrastructure. I for one rest easy knowing that the trillions we spend on homeland security protects us from these tree-dwelling, buck-toothed terrorists. From here on out, whenever I see one of those HS jackets, I'm going yell Squirrel!
Replace "Squirrels" with Immigrants
Replace "Birds" with non-whites
Replace "Snakes" with Snowflakes
Sick of hearing about squirrels being a threat.
for going after that poor unprotected infrastructure.
Send all of them to Gitmo on a one way ticket.
Problems like this have existed for decades or more and we know how to prevent it.
It's a business decision whether to invest in prevention, mitigation, both, or neither.
The "foreign government cyber-warfare" problem is less well-understood and is ever-evolving.
----
For what it's worth, most "mother nature" problems can be handled by having adequate redundancy and/or backup systems and, for most users, having an expected service level that allows for the grid (or internet, or other utility) to be offline for several seconds at a time while backup systems kick in. A state-level attacker is likely to be aware of the backup systems and attack both simultaneously.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
But there were two particular days in 1945 when that wasn't the case.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's not the number, in any system as large as the American electrical grid some percentage will always be down. The threat is some incredibly inconvenient parts of the grid going down at inconvenient times. Squirrels might cause thousands of "attacks", but they will never randomly knock out three levels of backups at key installations spread across the continent at the same time that China just happens to launch a nuclear attack.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
And stop thinking mankind is the ultimate in evolution.
I so wish there was competition between species for dominance of this planet.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
Was typing a comment but got distrac
Meth heads: Free copper, climb the pole!
Here in Colorado Springs the problem seems to be raccoons in older parts of town. Not sure if raccoons are good to eat but some hunters shoot squirrels for food. Those found dead in substations fried on transformers are precooked.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
In the Central Valley of California, we have a long dry season and (generally) a short cold wet season. Squirrels rip the insulation off of buried power cables during the dry season. Then when the rains come, rain water shorts out the systems causing power outages. This used to be exceptionally common, but has been less so during our 5-year drought.
I'm actually surprised that we haven't had more power failures in the last month's "Pineapple Express" storms; my power hasn't even flickered in several months.
I've noticed rising squirrel populations in our housing development over the last ten years (chipmunks and a few other critters too). Sometimes they gnaw on parts of your house but they mostly go after the trash. I guess that it's the lack of natural predators that has their populations growing. If you want to see a safe habitat for squirrels, walk around Boston Common where the pigeons and squirrels can compete for your snacks.
Telegraph companies were dealing with problems like these in the 1840s. It's a damn nuisance when a rodent chews through a cable or a storm brings down a pole. But these are random, localized, events that aren't likely to cause any lasting harm.
When squirrels coordinate their attacks to target a large geographical area, then I'll be worried about them.
1700 attacks affecting 5M people is only 3000 people per incident. I'm not sure what time range those numbers cover but if it's 35 years (based on the talk being called "35 Years of Cyberwar: The Squirrels Are Winning"), that's only 50 incidents per year, which doesn't seem like a lot if spread across the USA or the world.
I've never been in a squirrel related power outages (that I know of), but have been in 2 car-accident related outages, I'd imagine that cars are a much bigger source of outages.
Given the holes these bastards chewed into my trash cans I believe it.
Squirrels are an event that you can plan for - it happens all the time and it's a calculated cost. They're not intelligent actors trying to sabotage your system, they're just varmints doing what they do. Someone probing and making a list of the vulnerabilities of your system so they can perform a massive across-the-board outage of your infrastructure is a completely different thing. When a squirrel takes out a transformer it only affects a local area and for a short duration of time. Since it happens all the time the utilities are used to it and are good at locating and repairing the damage. Someone messing with the infrastructure internally is going to be pretty much unprecedented and could be difficult to figure out and fix.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Squirrels chew on everything. Like all rodents, squirrels' teeth grow throughout their lives.
built into the cable jacket?
A power transformer across the street from my office window on the 2nd floor of the NE State office bldg was blown out three times during the ten year period before I retired. I watched the last rascal jump between two insulators and draw a 21,000 volt spark. There was an explosion and fell to the pavement. With the power down and nothing else to do I went outside to check the squirrel. His skin was split from his left rear foot pad to his left front paw, like a zipper had been unzipped. And the air was filled with the odor of cooked squirrel. I didn't see the previous rascal's demise but I went out to investigate it as well. It had somehow gotten jammed and the current cooked him and then carbonized him before it exploded.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Yeah, the difference between squirrels and attackers is that squirrels don't learn and adapt and scale up their attacks.
So speaks someone who doesn't have a bird feeder in their yard. Squirrels most certainly *do* learn and adapt their attacks and they will never, ever stop until they get what they want. Their pace of learning and adaptation may sometimes be slower than a human enemy, but they will always be the more relentless adversary for they are driven by evolutionary survival imperatives and those are ultimately stronger than mere religious or political convictions.
On a more direct note (and the reason I'm posting AC): some years back I was part of deploying some critical new infrastructure and one of the scenarios the engineers had to address with the design was "concerted attack by rodentia". Aka rats, squirrels, etc. It can be done and it is done for genuinely critical stuff.
That's just what the damned belka want you to think! Then you find out that they're being controlled by an optogenetics device and the next thing you know we're all planting cabbage patches in the back yard.
You can never be too paranoid these days.
True story... back in the Stone Age, BI (Before Internet) I was at my first weather school in the USAF, at Chanute AFB IL, on a smoke break (remember those?), it was an instructor and a few us students.. we were on a side of the building that faced a sub-station.
There was a small explosion, we felt a very slight disturbance, a teeny tiny shockwave I guess. People started pouring out of the school -- the power had gone out at the school and surrounding buildings. After assessment, we were told "Go home, it'll be hours before it's fixed." A squirrel had gone and shorted out a transformer.. a big transformer, not those little ones you see up on poles. We later heard there was spalling around the transformer. Yea buddy, a squirrel and some metal made for shrapnel!
Second one, in North Miami - our building had only one way in for power, a 3-phase feed off a pole (!), then buried underground (!!) and into the power. Power goes out, but it was only one phase. The boss and I go to where the noise came from.. and there was a dead squirrel on the floor, with charred fur and a blown-out left hindleg. I still have the picture. It took FPL 3 hours to come and replace one fuse on the pole. Our 90 KVA UPS took the phones and network gear through those 3 hours with plenty to spare. No, we had no generator. Just a mondo UPS.
Fucking squirrels!
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
I'm a security-conscious sysadmin, which is why I spent my Saturday hunting squirrels.* You're welcome, America.
*actually, because free meat. Didn't know about The Rodent Threat until reading this, but you're still welcome, America.
The article only deals with power cuts. What about fiber data line cuts? We had a squirrel chew through one of our WAN links, inside a conduit. I can't imagine that could have tasted good.
They're not killing nearly as many people as toddlers with guns, and we're not doing anything about those!
http://www.snopes.com/toddlers...
Finally, the segment from Scrubs makes sense. The janitor was building a squirrel army for rodent terrorism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxCfxxeGhXA
"Rats must chew or their teeth grow through their heads!" - Hemlock Stones in Firesign Theater's - The Tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra
These growing rodent teeth, just like a dog or cat's claws are relentless. Imagine yourself a rodent with a need to chew- what would you choose? A rock? A discarded piece of fruit? It happens that the insulation used in much wiring is preferred.
I experienced this problem when rodents chose to chew the wiring in my new car at the place I was required to park overnight. It happens that a low tech solution was ideal. I acquired some spongy insulation that is normally used to insulate hot water pipes, and wrapped it around parts of my wiring harness.
The soft foam did not satisfy the chewing urge so the rodents never bothered my car again.
Whether animals or humans create some sort of threat, we should understand their motivations in order to form an ideal response. OFF TOPIC: and when we treat humans badly and expect them to be nice in return we are both blind and stupid.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Several years ago, a large chunk of downtown Winnipeg was subjected to a power outage. Cause? A squirrel managed to span two wires at the local substation, causing a short that knocked out the substation.
Now, I don't blame the squirrel. I blame the guys who designed the substation. Either space out the wires properly or use better short protection.
Trump didn't win . . . Hilary lost. So good of you to admit that.
This is one of those arguments, rephrased:
Squirrels do more damage than nuclear bombs every year.
Therefore fearing the effects of nuclear bombs is unwarranted.
Or: Something has not happened yet, so we don't need to fear it.
See Nassim Taleb on black swans.
Counter argument: Once upon a time, mass migrations of squirrels moved across America, at least in Illinois and New York. On story was old by a farmer in Illinois who's farm was eaten to little nubs on the ground by a wave of squirrels he estimated at 1.2 mile wide by 4 miles long. In a day or two they every bit of plant matter except for large branches of trees.
A squirrel migration in New York decimated everything in it's path in the late 1800's for miles until they entered a large river and man drowned.
Google squirrel migration.
Don't forget termites and drunk drivers hitting the wooden posts.
Other civilized countries bury their cables underground for exactly that reason.
I actually had a squirrel take out a telephone cable on the pole about a 15 years ago when DSL was the fastest option. Gnawed through the insulation to expose bare wires which was causing shorts. Started noticing intermittent drop outs and completely down when it rained. They kept wanting to blame it on me or internal wiring in my house even though it was working normally for years up to that point. This was at a time BEFORE WIFI when the defacto troubleshooting steps for them was "do you have a lamp sitting next to your modem or computer". Anyone remember that bullshit troubleshooting? After a week of phone tag I had them send a tech out. I felt vindicated when the tech showed me the section of damaged cable. Replaced it and was back to normal.
http://www.cantechletter.com/2...
Squirrels are a natural disaster, not a malicious security threat like hackers and foreign governments. This proves Cris Thomas is just an idiot.
And not just for the chewing! For every human being with ADHD, you can take them offline simply by yelling "squirrel!" Or you know, by pointing to an actual squirrel...
Squirrels. It's the threat from within, I tell you!
There's even an IEEE standard to protect against animal attacks
http://beyondstandards.ieee.org/smart-cities/ieee-1264-guides-utilities-in-mitigating-animal-intrusions-to-increase-grid-reliability/
That is the important question; The minor inconvenience of being without electricity for a few hours is nothing compared to getting a radial in your face.
I had a Comcast tech tell me the critters are his nemisis. Also grow rooms!
Get up!