Well, what Obama SAYS he's doing and what is ACTUALLY going to happen are likely to be totally different things.
What this really was all about was poking the democratic base in the butts so they will vote next time around by making some grand promises about doing something to appeal to the emotion that "something has got to be done!" AND Poking the Republicans in the eye in an effort to discredit them for "not doing anything" about the "problem" of gun violence (and divert attention from the Obamacare repeal bill which is likely to hit his desk before spring) . It also has the added benefit of taking the spotlight off the Donald and the rest of the republican field, just as they where poised to start the battle royal over the nomination and put the spotlight back onto Obama.
This was a purely political move. Political in it's timing, content and purely political in affect. It won't make a tinker's damn's difference in the death toll or anything else unless you count the way gun sales take off every time Obama starts talking about this topic.
Any new gun law needs to be confiscatory, no exception. Nobody in the 21st century needs to own a gun.
The 2nd needs to be repealed, and the police need to go door-to-door to round up all the guns.
You have that BACKWARDS (in more ways than one)... Before you can go round up all those guns, you are going to have to repeal the 2nd amendment (Not to mention the 4th). Good luck on doing either of those.
Until you manage to change the constitution and get the 2nd amendment repealed, folks will get to keep their guns. And until you repeal the 4th there will be no "door to door" searching to round up firearms by the police.
So stop with this crazy idea that you can get some law passed that allows the police to confiscate all the weapons out there. It's not going to happen, not in your life time or mine. Try coming up with EFFECTIVE and LEGAL solutions and forget this confiscation idea because the courts won't let you..
Everything just scales better when you automate it.
Not in this case. Automation of such an attack implies you have your exploit installed on a lot of separate systems and you can access them all remotely. Even in this case, the number of compromised systems was limited and the damage was exceedingly light. Plus this is Ukraine, home of Chernobyl and other well designed soviet technologies. Am attacker would have a much more difficult time in North America.
Sounds like a nutty trying to add their own spin to "The Wages of sin is death" from Romans 6:23. How it has anything to do with the possibility of a planet orbiting another star is an open question, as is how "death" = "everlasting torment in the mouth of the beast" too.
A hundred thousand customers? Drop in the bucket. Not much to see here.
What happened is 3 substations went offline. Three out of thousands of substations. In the USA we've had larger outages caused by a single squirrel who decided to become charcoal and crawled across the wrong two wires or by some hapless lineman who hit the wrong disconnect in the switchyard.
Heck, I've heard second hand where a couple of theater workers crashed the local grid on purpose back in the late 80's by wiring up every stage light they had and then bumping all the dimmers to full at 2AM. The lights all when bright just before the power shut down. The dramatic and unexpected power surge caused the local grid to disconnect and presto, hundreds of thousand of sleeping customers' power went out. I wasn't there, but I have no reason to doubt their story...
Where this idea that hackers could bring down electric service is troubling, it is not really a significant risk, nor is the way this exploit took place hard to counter. Virus scanners, firewalls, all are commonplace as are "air gapped" data networks used by utility providers in North America. And so 100,000 customers loose power sometime? Big deal. Yea it shouldn't happen, but mistakes get made and equipment sometimes fails. It's not like the restoration of power wasn't possible nearly instantly. The hack didn't cause a pile of expensive equipment to be reduced to junk, or that somebody armed with an RPG launcher (commonly available in the area) couldn't do more damage.
There are much bigger fish to fry here in the risk pool than this; Bigger fish which are much harder to protect from. Just the physical security problem presented by the hundreds of thousand substations is a bigger risk than the risk of hacking attacks. Add to that all the towers holding up the transmission lines running between all those substations. That risk is huge and literally everywhere. Why sweat the small stuff?
Only if there is no router between the firewall and the machine you which to filter. If you have a router between them, the firewall will only see the MAC address of the router for every host that is behind it... Oh, and you are assuming that you are using "Ethernet" which has MAC addresses at the hardware layer, which doesn't always need to be the case. There are other hardware layers over which you can route TCP/IP that don't use MAC addressing....
Even registering with the selective service is avoidable on religious grounds too.... Surely being a conscientious objector on religious grounds would be sufficient to be excepted from the requirement?
Dude, I lived in SE NC for nearly a decade, it's a foreign country which is mostly owned by the pulp mills. I never got used to the smell of the pulp mills or that "BBQ Pork" stuff which was chopped find and drenched in vinegar based "sauce" and served with "Hush puppies" or over cooked green stuff and sweet tea with enough sugar to put you in a coma. Don't get me wrong, the place has a charm all it's own and I sometimes wish I had the time to go back, drive the outer banks and consume some of that BBQ just for the memories it would bring back, but it's about as far from mainstream culture as you can get, except perhaps some of the more remote areas in the Smokey Mountains in the west of the state.
I don't know, our urban sprawl seems to be a bit less dense than say that of England.
I know it's changing some, but I was in Manchester a while back and generally you can get just about anywhere you want to go on rail/foot fairly quickly. Things are packed much closer there than here. The middle class home takes up much less space both in interior size and land foot print consumed than the same in the USA where I have a 3,000 square foot home on about 1/2 an acre in the suburbs. Heck, my back fence is 120 feet long across the back. I worked with a guy in Manchester (he actually was my manager for a time) and his house was about 1/2 the size and had a 15'x20' garden in the back though I'm sure he got paid more so I assume his home was standard middle class or better.
So, yes, our urban sprawl is a lot less dense than most of Europe's urban areas. In fact, I would consider the parts of Europe I've seen which where "urban sprawl" to be about the same as living "downtown" here. We are much more spread out. There is a town just north of where I live that REQUIRES a minimum lot size of 5 acres by law. In suburban Manchester 5 acres holds something like 20 residences with space left over for a couple of roads, parking and a public park.
Population density matters here, and it drives why Americans have and use so many cars, drive longer distances on average and all that...
Do realize that this is ALL SPIN no matter what way you slice it. Who knows what the real story is, did they open up access on accident or on purpose? Did Sander's folks exploit that opening? Was there ever any security there to start with? Who knows? All you will get out of the press is what sells advertising and out of the candidates what generates the most buzz/fundraising they can manage. It's a game to them. It's like this canard that Sanders is not a career politician even though he's held elected office for 25 years, where Hillary IS a career politician having held elected office for what, 1 senate term of 6 years or so? It's all spin.
Personally, I don't care one bit either way on this story. Where I'd love to have Sanders as the democratic nominee (or as an independent candidate running to the Hill's left for that matter) I really don't have a dog in this hunt being I'll not be voting for either of them under any circumstances.
So... To make is short. I was trying to make a joke about the democrats and data security.... Saying that Sanders and the Hill are both as qualified as the other on this subject.
Knowing where to push and when then becomes the problem for the hacker. Unless you know what the configuration and power flow is right NOW, you are going to be poking around in the dark while the lights stay on everywhere. You might bring parts of the grid down, but not all of it. The blackout you mentioned is about the extent of the damage a determined hacker *might* be able to cause, but they are going to have to understand more about the system and it's configuration than the operators do, then have access to the necessary points to initiate the necessary cascading events to bring down the grid. I don't think your average hacker is going to have enough access and enough internal information about control systems, operating conditions and configurations to really do anything.
Look, it's a fact that there are issues, but even in the event you outline only a fraction of the north American grid was affected. It took nearly 4 hours for the series of events and operator errors to conclude in the final irreversible cascade failure that took 10 min to run it's course and leave large parts of 7 states and 1 province without power starting at about 4:15 PM. However, this failure did not cause lasting damage and restoration of electric service went quickly with large parts of the grid restarted and many customers restored before the end of the day, the majority before noon the next day and virtually everybody had their power on within 24 hours with a handful having to wait 48 hours or more. Where serious, this event is actually an indication of how resilient the grid actually is.
This failure could have been avoided had the operators not made mistakes, had FirstEnergy's operators communicated what was happening to the surrounding areas, even by making a phone call sometime during the 4 hours it took for the whole series of events to unfold the problems could have had a drastically reduced geographic impact. But even in the face of a stressed grid, unexpected generation capacity reductions, equipment malfunctions and operator failures, the grid survived 4 hours before a part of it went down just before the scheduled peek load which usually hits at about 6 pm local in the hot summer months. No hack attack could mimic this series of events and bring down the grid even at this limited scale. No hacker has enough information, enough access, or enough insight to bring down the grid from a keyboard connected only to the internet.
Now if you want to argue that somebody could infiltrate the control rooms or plan physical attacks on infrastructure and bring the grid down, I won't argue with you on that, but no hacker armed with a keyboard and in internet connection is going to be successful in bringing down the grid in any large scale way.
But I'm still waiting on how you make Mexico pay for it..
While not a fan of Trump, I recognize that as a business person he starts with a more out there proposal which he can then back off from during negotiations... which this sounds to be too.
The only ways I've come up with involve military force or some kind of new tax/tariff etc.. Just sending them a bill marked "over due, please pay now" is unlikely to be effective.
Granted, such projections are based on more or less static accounting and discounts any changes in behavior.
Like I said, if you are not willing to recover the cost of the wall by force of arms, all you can do is add a tax or tariff on economic activity.
But as others have pointed out, putting a tax on money transfers to/from Mexico really doesn't solve the problem because then folks would change their behavior and just send cash directly...
Where effective in the Netherlands, there are some legal impediments to doing such a thing in the USA which stem from our constitution.
We keep the same records as your "civil register" at the same "local level" but they are independently managed and are not coordinated. For instance, if you get married, this fact is recorded in the county you get married in, which may not be the county or even the state you live in. Also, your civil register produces an ID for every person over 14 years old which must be presented when doing any government function, something which is considered racist by some sectors of the USA's society. Because of our constitution, the records you put in the "civil register" really cannot be put in one place, but are kept independently.
In the USA, registration is OPTIONAL for just about everything including voting. Where registration is required it can usually be avoided if you try or have a specific religious objection to being registered.
Build a wall? Sure... But I'm still waiting on how you make Mexico pay for it.. The only ways I've come up with involve military force or some kind of new tax/tariff etc.. Just sending them a bill marked "over due, please pay now" is unlikely to be effective.
I beg you, ANY other republican contender over Trump... Please? I'll take him over the Hill, but he's my absolute last choice of the possible republican contenders.
without NAT as a first but relatively porous line of defense against random packets coming in from the open Internet, it's necessary to be much more deliberate about which types of packets to accept and which to reject.
What? If you want the same 'security' as NAT, can't you just set the firewall to reject all incoming connections?
Sounds simple enough.... Of course, nothing is really as simple as it first seems.... Good first step though.
Where I get people's reluctance to adopt IPV6 and having their local networks become immediately routable and thus externally addressable, there is a bit more to this "security" thing when switching IP versions than just dropping inbound connections. The problem stems from the fact that when you go full on IPV6 and allow an internal host to transit your firewall outbound, you have exposed more than just the router's IP, but internal network information too. This means that an attacker now knows something they didn't before. It's true that this knowledge doesn't give them any special access if your router is working properly, but it does mean that if the router doesn't always do the right thing, they will have an easier time attacking your internal network.
Not that there are no solutions to this issue out there or that one cannot still protect their internal networks, only that such protection needs to be thought about in somewhat different terms and perspectives. IPV6 messed with more than just the number of bits in the IP address, but messed with the fundamentals of how traffic gets routed. It made a lot of things easier, faster and cheaper, but it also had impacts on network security considerations that I'm not sure we fully understand even after this long.
True, but let's not forget that the USA is generally HUGE compared to most European countries and the USA has an overall population density which is pretty low. This is why we spend so much time in our cars, it's a long way to work and Grandma's house.
Let's also not forget that automobiles have vastly improved their emission standards and efficiency over the last few decades. I remember the yellow-brown haze which blanked LA nearly continuously in the 80's and have noticed that it's not nearly as bad anymore. So all is not lost.
The power grid is largely redundant, built so parts can fail and the whole keeps working. This makes the attacker's job more difficult. You cannot just break into your local substation, push a few buttons and bring down the grid, you have to mount a coordinated attack at multiple points. To be successful, you have to have a good idea what you are doing (a working plan), in addition to having enough access to grid components to carry out your plan.
So, I'm not saying it's impossible for a sufficiently motivated and equipped adversary to figure out what to do, only that it's beyond the capabilities of some hacker or group of hackers to launch a successful attack over the internet. There simply isn't enough vulnerable points to access critical equipment available for such a thing and if there where, it would be exceedingly hard to catalog and develop working exploits for enough to do any serious damage. In short, somebody's going to have to attack the physical infrastructure PHYSICALLY to pull this off, because whacking away at a remote keyboard won't be enough.
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Well, what Obama SAYS he's doing and what is ACTUALLY going to happen are likely to be totally different things.
What this really was all about was poking the democratic base in the butts so they will vote next time around by making some grand promises about doing something to appeal to the emotion that "something has got to be done!" AND Poking the Republicans in the eye in an effort to discredit them for "not doing anything" about the "problem" of gun violence (and divert attention from the Obamacare repeal bill which is likely to hit his desk before spring) . It also has the added benefit of taking the spotlight off the Donald and the rest of the republican field, just as they where poised to start the battle royal over the nomination and put the spotlight back onto Obama.
This was a purely political move. Political in it's timing, content and purely political in affect. It won't make a tinker's damn's difference in the death toll or anything else unless you count the way gun sales take off every time Obama starts talking about this topic.
Any new gun law needs to be confiscatory, no exception. Nobody in the 21st century needs to own a gun.
The 2nd needs to be repealed, and the police need to go door-to-door to round up all the guns.
You have that BACKWARDS (in more ways than one)... Before you can go round up all those guns, you are going to have to repeal the 2nd amendment (Not to mention the 4th). Good luck on doing either of those.
Until you manage to change the constitution and get the 2nd amendment repealed, folks will get to keep their guns. And until you repeal the 4th there will be no "door to door" searching to round up firearms by the police.
So stop with this crazy idea that you can get some law passed that allows the police to confiscate all the weapons out there. It's not going to happen, not in your life time or mine. Try coming up with EFFECTIVE and LEGAL solutions and forget this confiscation idea because the courts won't let you..
Everything just scales better when you automate it.
Not in this case. Automation of such an attack implies you have your exploit installed on a lot of separate systems and you can access them all remotely. Even in this case, the number of compromised systems was limited and the damage was exceedingly light. Plus this is Ukraine, home of Chernobyl and other well designed soviet technologies. Am attacker would have a much more difficult time in North America.
Sounds like a nutty trying to add their own spin to "The Wages of sin is death" from Romans 6:23. How it has anything to do with the possibility of a planet orbiting another star is an open question, as is how "death" = "everlasting torment in the mouth of the beast" too.
A hundred thousand customers? Drop in the bucket. Not much to see here.
What happened is 3 substations went offline. Three out of thousands of substations. In the USA we've had larger outages caused by a single squirrel who decided to become charcoal and crawled across the wrong two wires or by some hapless lineman who hit the wrong disconnect in the switchyard.
Heck, I've heard second hand where a couple of theater workers crashed the local grid on purpose back in the late 80's by wiring up every stage light they had and then bumping all the dimmers to full at 2AM. The lights all when bright just before the power shut down. The dramatic and unexpected power surge caused the local grid to disconnect and presto, hundreds of thousand of sleeping customers' power went out. I wasn't there, but I have no reason to doubt their story...
Where this idea that hackers could bring down electric service is troubling, it is not really a significant risk, nor is the way this exploit took place hard to counter. Virus scanners, firewalls, all are commonplace as are "air gapped" data networks used by utility providers in North America. And so 100,000 customers loose power sometime? Big deal. Yea it shouldn't happen, but mistakes get made and equipment sometimes fails. It's not like the restoration of power wasn't possible nearly instantly. The hack didn't cause a pile of expensive equipment to be reduced to junk, or that somebody armed with an RPG launcher (commonly available in the area) couldn't do more damage.
There are much bigger fish to fry here in the risk pool than this; Bigger fish which are much harder to protect from. Just the physical security problem presented by the hundreds of thousand substations is a bigger risk than the risk of hacking attacks. Add to that all the towers holding up the transmission lines running between all those substations. That risk is huge and literally everywhere. Why sweat the small stuff?
Yippee!
So he kept an MP4 of the pilot in color on all those disks eh?
Seriously... It's probably just a bunch of ASCII Art...
I don't know, as a former Comcast customer they seem to have about the same competency in home security as providing cable TV service.
Plus, there were no injuries from being whacked over the head with a saber.
You are doing it wrong..
In the Ukraine perhaps. In the rest of the world? I think the story is a bit different.
Only if there is no router between the firewall and the machine you which to filter. If you have a router between them, the firewall will only see the MAC address of the router for every host that is behind it... Oh, and you are assuming that you are using "Ethernet" which has MAC addresses at the hardware layer, which doesn't always need to be the case. There are other hardware layers over which you can route TCP/IP that don't use MAC addressing....
Even registering with the selective service is avoidable on religious grounds too.... Surely being a conscientious objector on religious grounds would be sufficient to be excepted from the requirement?
Dude, I lived in SE NC for nearly a decade, it's a foreign country which is mostly owned by the pulp mills. I never got used to the smell of the pulp mills or that "BBQ Pork" stuff which was chopped find and drenched in vinegar based "sauce" and served with "Hush puppies" or over cooked green stuff and sweet tea with enough sugar to put you in a coma. Don't get me wrong, the place has a charm all it's own and I sometimes wish I had the time to go back, drive the outer banks and consume some of that BBQ just for the memories it would bring back, but it's about as far from mainstream culture as you can get, except perhaps some of the more remote areas in the Smokey Mountains in the west of the state.
I don't know, our urban sprawl seems to be a bit less dense than say that of England.
I know it's changing some, but I was in Manchester a while back and generally you can get just about anywhere you want to go on rail/foot fairly quickly. Things are packed much closer there than here. The middle class home takes up much less space both in interior size and land foot print consumed than the same in the USA where I have a 3,000 square foot home on about 1/2 an acre in the suburbs. Heck, my back fence is 120 feet long across the back. I worked with a guy in Manchester (he actually was my manager for a time) and his house was about 1/2 the size and had a 15'x20' garden in the back though I'm sure he got paid more so I assume his home was standard middle class or better.
So, yes, our urban sprawl is a lot less dense than most of Europe's urban areas. In fact, I would consider the parts of Europe I've seen which where "urban sprawl" to be about the same as living "downtown" here. We are much more spread out. There is a town just north of where I live that REQUIRES a minimum lot size of 5 acres by law. In suburban Manchester 5 acres holds something like 20 residences with space left over for a couple of roads, parking and a public park.
Population density matters here, and it drives why Americans have and use so many cars, drive longer distances on average and all that...
Do realize that this is ALL SPIN no matter what way you slice it. Who knows what the real story is, did they open up access on accident or on purpose? Did Sander's folks exploit that opening? Was there ever any security there to start with? Who knows? All you will get out of the press is what sells advertising and out of the candidates what generates the most buzz/fundraising they can manage. It's a game to them. It's like this canard that Sanders is not a career politician even though he's held elected office for 25 years, where Hillary IS a career politician having held elected office for what, 1 senate term of 6 years or so? It's all spin.
Personally, I don't care one bit either way on this story. Where I'd love to have Sanders as the democratic nominee (or as an independent candidate running to the Hill's left for that matter) I really don't have a dog in this hunt being I'll not be voting for either of them under any circumstances.
So... To make is short. I was trying to make a joke about the democrats and data security.... Saying that Sanders and the Hill are both as qualified as the other on this subject.
Knowing where to push and when then becomes the problem for the hacker. Unless you know what the configuration and power flow is right NOW, you are going to be poking around in the dark while the lights stay on everywhere. You might bring parts of the grid down, but not all of it. The blackout you mentioned is about the extent of the damage a determined hacker *might* be able to cause, but they are going to have to understand more about the system and it's configuration than the operators do, then have access to the necessary points to initiate the necessary cascading events to bring down the grid. I don't think your average hacker is going to have enough access and enough internal information about control systems, operating conditions and configurations to really do anything.
Look, it's a fact that there are issues, but even in the event you outline only a fraction of the north American grid was affected. It took nearly 4 hours for the series of events and operator errors to conclude in the final irreversible cascade failure that took 10 min to run it's course and leave large parts of 7 states and 1 province without power starting at about 4:15 PM. However, this failure did not cause lasting damage and restoration of electric service went quickly with large parts of the grid restarted and many customers restored before the end of the day, the majority before noon the next day and virtually everybody had their power on within 24 hours with a handful having to wait 48 hours or more. Where serious, this event is actually an indication of how resilient the grid actually is.
This failure could have been avoided had the operators not made mistakes, had FirstEnergy's operators communicated what was happening to the surrounding areas, even by making a phone call sometime during the 4 hours it took for the whole series of events to unfold the problems could have had a drastically reduced geographic impact. But even in the face of a stressed grid, unexpected generation capacity reductions, equipment malfunctions and operator failures, the grid survived 4 hours before a part of it went down just before the scheduled peek load which usually hits at about 6 pm local in the hot summer months. No hack attack could mimic this series of events and bring down the grid even at this limited scale. No hacker has enough information, enough access, or enough insight to bring down the grid from a keyboard connected only to the internet.
Now if you want to argue that somebody could infiltrate the control rooms or plan physical attacks on infrastructure and bring the grid down, I won't argue with you on that, but no hacker armed with a keyboard and in internet connection is going to be successful in bringing down the grid in any large scale way.
While not a fan of Trump, I recognize that as a business person he starts with a more out there proposal which he can then back off from during negotiations... which this sounds to be too.
You aren't thinking creatively enough.
If $23 billion is in fact being sent from the US to Mexico... just tack a 20% 'wall' tax and you pay for a $49 billion dollar wall in just 10 years.
Granted, such projections are based on more or less static accounting and discounts any changes in behavior.
Like I said, if you are not willing to recover the cost of the wall by force of arms, all you can do is add a tax or tariff on economic activity.
But as others have pointed out, putting a tax on money transfers to/from Mexico really doesn't solve the problem because then folks would change their behavior and just send cash directly...
Where effective in the Netherlands, there are some legal impediments to doing such a thing in the USA which stem from our constitution.
We keep the same records as your "civil register" at the same "local level" but they are independently managed and are not coordinated. For instance, if you get married, this fact is recorded in the county you get married in, which may not be the county or even the state you live in. Also, your civil register produces an ID for every person over 14 years old which must be presented when doing any government function, something which is considered racist by some sectors of the USA's society. Because of our constitution, the records you put in the "civil register" really cannot be put in one place, but are kept independently.
In the USA, registration is OPTIONAL for just about everything including voting. Where registration is required it can usually be avoided if you try or have a specific religious objection to being registered.
Hill is that you?
What does it matter now?
FIFY
Didn't Bernie Sanders get in trouble with the DNC for accessing data he wasn't allowed to? Seems up his alley too.
Build a wall? Sure... But I'm still waiting on how you make Mexico pay for it.. The only ways I've come up with involve military force or some kind of new tax/tariff etc.. Just sending them a bill marked "over due, please pay now" is unlikely to be effective.
I beg you, ANY other republican contender over Trump... Please? I'll take him over the Hill, but he's my absolute last choice of the possible republican contenders.
without NAT as a first but relatively porous line of defense against random packets coming in from the open Internet, it's necessary to be much more deliberate about which types of packets to accept and which to reject.
What? If you want the same 'security' as NAT, can't you just set the firewall to reject all incoming connections?
Sounds simple enough.... Of course, nothing is really as simple as it first seems.... Good first step though.
Where I get people's reluctance to adopt IPV6 and having their local networks become immediately routable and thus externally addressable, there is a bit more to this "security" thing when switching IP versions than just dropping inbound connections. The problem stems from the fact that when you go full on IPV6 and allow an internal host to transit your firewall outbound, you have exposed more than just the router's IP, but internal network information too. This means that an attacker now knows something they didn't before. It's true that this knowledge doesn't give them any special access if your router is working properly, but it does mean that if the router doesn't always do the right thing, they will have an easier time attacking your internal network.
Not that there are no solutions to this issue out there or that one cannot still protect their internal networks, only that such protection needs to be thought about in somewhat different terms and perspectives. IPV6 messed with more than just the number of bits in the IP address, but messed with the fundamentals of how traffic gets routed. It made a lot of things easier, faster and cheaper, but it also had impacts on network security considerations that I'm not sure we fully understand even after this long.
Wow...hyperbole much?
Oh Never! Why do you ask?
This is a standard environmentalist tactic, using over stated affects to imply something, then making an emotional argument out of it.
NOTHING we do is "clean" if you think about it. Riding your bike and walking are all environmentally messy at some level.
True, but let's not forget that the USA is generally HUGE compared to most European countries and the USA has an overall population density which is pretty low. This is why we spend so much time in our cars, it's a long way to work and Grandma's house.
Let's also not forget that automobiles have vastly improved their emission standards and efficiency over the last few decades. I remember the yellow-brown haze which blanked LA nearly continuously in the 80's and have noticed that it's not nearly as bad anymore. So all is not lost.
No, that's not the only thing I'm saying..
The power grid is largely redundant, built so parts can fail and the whole keeps working. This makes the attacker's job more difficult. You cannot just break into your local substation, push a few buttons and bring down the grid, you have to mount a coordinated attack at multiple points. To be successful, you have to have a good idea what you are doing (a working plan), in addition to having enough access to grid components to carry out your plan.
So, I'm not saying it's impossible for a sufficiently motivated and equipped adversary to figure out what to do, only that it's beyond the capabilities of some hacker or group of hackers to launch a successful attack over the internet. There simply isn't enough vulnerable points to access critical equipment available for such a thing and if there where, it would be exceedingly hard to catalog and develop working exploits for enough to do any serious damage. In short, somebody's going to have to attack the physical infrastructure PHYSICALLY to pull this off, because whacking away at a remote keyboard won't be enough.