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 .

Comments

He's missing the point.

[Cyberpunk Reality]

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.

Re:He's missing the point.

[Sarten-X]

Squirrels and birds are also never going to be launching coordinated events designed to overwhelm the utilities' abilities to bypass and repair damage. Nobody cares that a foreign nation might be able to shut down a provider. The concern is that they might shut down all providers.

Re:He's missing the point.

[hey!]

It would be nice if people could learn to think in terms of threats that fell somewhere between "safe to ignore" and "extinction level event". Or could distinguish between "extreme and expensive" responses and "effective" ones.

9/11 could have been prevented by simple, conservative and inexpensive countermeasures. After 9/11 politicians droned on about how "9/11 changed everything," but the cold sober fact was that it in fact changed nothing. It just showed that some of the things sensible people had already been telling us to do (like reinforcing cockpit doors or getting agencies to work together despite institutional rivalries) really did need to be done. Instead "9/11 changed everything" became the rallying cry for every pet scheme that had heretofore been correctly dismissed as too expensive, hare-brained, or just plain dumb.

Which doesn't change the fact that something needed to be done. Here's the lesson I think we should take into this infrastructure debate: we should take sensible and conservative steps to secure infrastructure against terrorism now, before events put foolish ones on the table.

Trees

[Fly Swatter]

.. cause far more outages and damage. Squirrels merely live in trees. Blame the trees.

non-stationary.

[Anonymous Coward]

The number of deaths due to nuclear weapons, as a fraction of total deaths, is very small as well.

Re:How about ...

[alvinrod]

Or meth heads trying to steal the copper out of electric cables or other equipment.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't want middle eastern muslims to flood the USA and throw them off buildings.

Re:Squirrels spread their attacks conveniently

[Kohath]

Yeah, the difference between random factors like squirrels and attackers is that random factors don't learn and adapt and scale up their attacks. Random factors stop randomly. Attackers don't stop unless you stop them.

Re:Squirrels spread their attacks conveniently

[phantomfive]

How many spies and saboteurs with well-placed bombs (or high-powered rifles) would it take to disable the power grid? Not many, I would think. There are a lot of threats besides 'the cyber.'

Security is something for professionals like us to think about always while we're working, but it's not something to panic about. A lot of these news stories like this one are designed to spread panic, and to increase power to those who are spreading panic.