{"id":24311,"date":"2017-06-29T07:39:46","date_gmt":"2017-06-29T12:39:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=24311"},"modified":"2017-06-29T07:40:01","modified_gmt":"2017-06-29T12:40:01","slug":"the-power-grid-is-far-more-vulnerable-to-cyber-attacks-than-most-people-realize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=24311","title":{"rendered":"The Power Grid Is Far More Vulnerable to Cyber Attacks Than Most People Realize"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Power Grid Is Far More Vulnerable to Cyber Attacks Than Most People Realize<\/a><\/h3>\n

\"\"In December of 2015, 230,000 people in Western Ukraine lost power after 30 substations were mysteriously shut off<\/a>. Contrary to what most people assumed at the time, this wasn\u2019t an innocuous power outage. The authorities would later admit that the loss of power was caused by a cyber attack, which marked the first time that malware was successfully used to attack a power grid. A similar, albeit more sophisticated cyber attack, occurred one year later just outside of Kiev. Given the current tensions between Russia and Ukraine, it\u2019s widely believed that the Russian government was responsible for these incidents.<\/p>\n

However, there\u2019s more to this story than meets the eye. A computer security company has been investigating these attacks, and has discovered the malware that was used to take down the grid. They\u2019ve found that it\u2019s far more dangerous and easier to use<\/a> than anyone realized before.<\/p>\n

The danger of the malware is that it can automatically trip the breakers within a power system that keep the electrical lines from being overloaded. If one breaker is tripped, the load is shipped to another portion of the power grid. If enough are tripped, in the right places, it\u2019s possible to create a cascading effect that will eventually overload the entire system, said Weatherford, who was formerly the chief security\u00a0officer\u00a0at the North American Electric\u00a0Reliability\u00a0Corporation, the\u00a0regulatory authority for North American utilities.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cIn some cases, it could then take days to restart all the plants,\u201d he said.<\/em><\/p>\n

Two things stand out about the malware, dubbed \u201cIndustroyer\u201d by the researchers\u00a0\u2014 it\u2019s an order of magnitude easier to use than previous programs and\u00a0it wasn\u2019t actually deployed to do any real damage,\u00a0meaning whoever\u2019s behind the December attack\u00a0might simply have been\u00a0testing the waters.\u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Power Grid Is Far More Vulnerable to Cyber Attacks Than Most People Realize In December of 2015, 230,000 people in Western Ukraine lost power after 30 substations were mysteriously shut off. Contrary to what most people assumed at the time, this wasn\u2019t an innocuous power outage. The authorities would later admit that the loss […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,7],"tags":[2077,11729,1574,6787],"class_list":["post-24311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-survival-2","tag-cyberattack","tag-joshua-krause","tag-power-grid","tag-ready-nutrition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24311"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24313,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24311\/revisions\/24313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}