An article from Yahoo about a state-sponsored data breach that may have handed over some interesting info to the Chinese/Russians.
A government plan for restarting power generation? Interesting. Makes sense when you think about it…but I’d never thought about it before. Shades of “One Second After“. (WOrth reading, btw.)
As the saying goes, “it takes money to make money”. Apparently the same is true, to some degree, in power generation. As I read it, previous plans for restarting an offline power plant assume you’ll be able to have power from elsewhere where the grid is up. But, if the entire grid is down…well…you can’t start up your power plant if you can’t even turn on the lights in the control room.
The solution, it seems, is to either have enough capacity in your onsite generators to get the plant up and running, or get your electricity from a source that will continue to provide..such as hydropower.
What I find interesting here is that .gov had a planned response in place for a grid-down power plant restart procedure..and now that the playbook for that has fallen into enemy (and make no mistake about it, thats what the Chinese are) hands they know how to create that grid-down situation and disable our ability to get past it. All in all, to my unstrategic way of thinking, that seems to have just made the possibility of an attack of some kind on the national power system more likely.
Very cursory googling shows that apparently the current plan (or one of them) is RADICS.. Apparently the .gov has, in the last two years, stepped up it’s research into preparing against cyberattacks that target energy infrastructure. Interesting, that.
Remember the old days when targeting a nations energy infrastructure involved a B-52 instead of a laptop?
Maybe this is what sleepy joe meant by his cryptic statement..”darkest days are still ahead”..?
He also referred to the “Dark Winter”…
Being in the electric utility business now for over four decades, I can give a blue collar take on this.
Nearly everything now depends on a computer. To open or close a breaker, whether it be at a power plant, transmission or some of the distrubution system the system operator needs a SCADA (system control and data aquisition) link. Guess where most of the software comes from? China. Guess who has trojan back door programs built into that software? China. Guess who pays a ton of money for IT contractors (mostly from India ‘cuz they work cheap!) to make sure they can’t get in? You, the ratepayer.
People rail against communism to the point of talking about shooting ’em up and yet the people that run the show has put most of our electrical cards into the communist’s hands.
A giant (3000 megawatt) plant was just shut down in N. Arizona (Navajo Station) because it was deemed too expensive to run anymore and coal is evil. Then California had rolling blackouts because there wasn’t enough generation and they think burning coal is of the devil. That’s like shit canning your diesel back up genset because you don’t like smoke or buying fuel and then crying because the power is out.
The whole system is essentially generators (natural gas, hydro, solar, nuke and coal) linked together with transmission lines. To wheel the power this way or that requires a lot of co-ordination between companies that are competitors and may or may not want to play nice. If they have a surplus of power and someone is in great need then the price goes way up. If there is not any available then they will let people sit in the dark.
ENRON was a master at that game and got caught cheating. But the real secret is THEY ALL CHEAT!
When a hospital, business, military base, federal court house, trailer park, etc. goes out of power I’m the guy they send to figure it out and get the power back on. I feel for the customers that have no clue how poorly the system is run and suffer due to black outs caused by bad management.
The more I point out the cheating and what a bunch of screw ups they are the more they want to fire my ass so mostly I keep quiet and rake in the big bucks like everyone else in the industry.
Not a surprise that there would bu such a plan. The government may be overall incompetent, but certain parts of it are exceptionally good at what they do.
Why would the chinks want to destroy large swaths of the US? (which we would do to ourselves in a grid gone scenario)
Pretty sure they plan on taking us intact in the long term plan.
Youre not looking at the bigger picture.
One possible reason would be to create a tremendous problem for the US to keep us busy while they reclaim Taiwan.
Yeah, i get the short term goals, but China tends to think long term. I think they may have even said something like that officially in past years. They ‘know’ (correctly or not) that they will one day repossess Taiwan. One of the benefits of a totalitarian system is the ability to sacrifice short term rewards for long term gains. Taiwan is an excellent example of that. How long would the US stand still if say, Mexico took over a state like say, California.
OK, bad example…..
I don’t think they want to rule us, or at least not ALL of us. I think they want us distracted or powerless so they can control areas around them, first but not solely Taiwan as Zero mentioned.
I would not be surprised if they want a foothold on this side of the Pacific, but they can get that more easily in Central America than here in North America.
Have you read the Maelstrom Rising series of books? They present a falling apart America attacked by multiple sides at once – begun by a national power outage.
Our yellow brethern are already re-colonizing Africa in the name of food security.
You can search Google for quite a number of articles on how the Chinese are partnering with underdeveloped African nations (redundant?) to provide infrastructure in exchange for land to farm.
Japan did to Pearl Harbor what it needed to in order to pursue regional goals. Decapitate US Pacific power and the Japanese would have free reign to re-shape the Far East.
A crippled US is more likely a Chinese benefit for something greater than a ‘breakaway province’. Vietnam has always been enticing to the Chinese and they may decide to dust off the old Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere and run with it; they just have to update the playbook and translate it from the original Japanese.
Also a massive die off here equals cheap housing for hundreds of millions of Chinese!!!
They don’t need us for that. They’ve invested billionsin ‘aid’ to Africa, along with long-term leases of huge swaths of farmalnd there. Do a little investigation and you’ll see that China has put a lot of resources into ‘humanitarian’ and ‘developmental’ aid to Africa that has secondary uses for China’s military….for example, building airports that are far too large for the needs of the small African country its in but exactly the right size for landing large military aircraft transports. That sorta thing.
They’re also all over Central and South America. Guess who now owns the panama canal?
Agreed, they are the biggest investor in Africa since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Been there and seen it.
It was a very large coal mining operation in Mozambique. They paved roads, (from the mines to the port), are spending huge amounts of money.
It was pointed out by my outfitter that all of the “improvements” are quite temporary.
Only there to last long enough to get all the coal and leave.
Anyone know why the power plants need to be connected to the internet in the first place? If I’m understanding this correctly, the hackers get access to the power plant systems and can then gain control. But why would a power plant need to have their systems connected to the web anyway?
Probably a very naive question, but from someone not in that industry I can’t understand the reason.
If power plants need to connect together to share data, shouldn’t the gov have them connect via a dedicated closed system?
The days of one power plant or company running their own grid are long over. They share power – back and forth all of the time. Do you still get junkmail advertising a cheaper alternative for your electric power supplier? That should help explain what the grid REALLY is. Multiple companies buy and sell power over the same wires. Heavy loads require other suppliers in surrounding areas to fill the void, because if one goes down, there tends to be a domino effect until the control systems can isolate that area. Hacking of the SCADA system networks can cause the control systems to malfunction or fail to isolate problems. It is very intricate and synchronization is critical.
I agree that the way the system has evolved is stupid, but it’s not just our power grid. All of your medical, financial and other personal information is all over the internet. It’s not by accident. The three letter security agencies wanted access to all of that information and mandated that it be established in a way that they could obtain it. The professor that taught my graduate level cryptography course and worked as a mathematician for one of those three letter agencies told the class that they chose AES (Rijndael) for the mandated encryption algorithm that even the military is required to use. He said they knew how to read it before they required it for all secure data communications in the US. Power grid data comms also use AES. China can read it too.
It’s called TREASON.
Had a friend who ran security at a nuke plant, when he found out I ran a USMC react team,he wanted to talk. He got very quiet and turned pale when told what a small team could do to his site. I then extrapolated that to what a small team could do regionaly/nationally and later (9/11) knew it was a publicity stunt immediately. A real attack would have crippled this country in a few hours/days.
Ted Koppel wrote a book on (the lack of) security around our electronic grid. Being a household name he got access to some really serious people.
It’s called Lights Out. I can mail it to you if you want to give it a read.
Ya…I read ” One Second After “. William Forstchin’s book. Scariest book that I’ve read outside of some parts of the Bible. There is a back story to this book which I’m not going to bother with to much here…but, William Forstchin has been close friends with Newt Gingrich for over 20 years. They have written several books together. The 2004 Congressional Hearings on our vulnerability to “EMP Attack” is what got him started working on the book. If ” One Second After ” doesn’t get you motivated to prep….I don’t know what will. Outside of our current crisis of course.