$250K Reward Offered In California Power Grid Attack 111
An anonymous reader writes "The Associated Press reports that Pacific Gas & Electric Co. has put up a $250,000 reward for 'information leading to an arrest and conviction in a startling attack mounted nearly a year ago on telephone lines and the power grid in Silicon Valley.' Besides cutting power lines, the attackers also cut AT&T fiber-optic phone lines, thereby denying some people access to 911, and fired shots into a PB&E substation, knocking out 17 transformers in Silicon Valley and causing $15 million in damage. As of this post, the perpetrators are still unidentified and continue to elude the FBI. Meanwhile, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on Thursday was brought before the Senate Energy Committee to explain why the FERC disseminated via insecure media a sensitive document describing where all the nation's power grids are particularly sensitive to a physical attack. FERC responded with assurances that databases are currently being scrubbed and procedures being implemented to safeguard critical data."
Moo (Score:1)
Linky [sfgate.com] linky [go.com].
there is a man called (Score:1)
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
. Meanwhile, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on Thursday was brought before the Senate Energy Committee to explain why the FERC disseminated via insecure media a sensitive document describing where all the nation's power grids are particularly sensitive to a physical attack.
Because nobody will take security seriously until something bad happens? And once that something bad happens there will be plenty of people screaming, "False flag!"
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We all should ware Kevlar vests to protect us from shootings. Those who got killed and didn't wear a Kevlar vest is their own damn fault.
You find a flaw, you report it. If they choose not to act and something goes wrong, it is the guys who failed to take actions fault, with the guy who did the crime, you end up the Hero. If you find a flaw and exploit it. It is all your fault, and you are the villain.
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Security is a design principle not a fashion statement, and good practice in dealing with critical infrastructure.
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It's human nature. We are reactive.
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The best predictor of the future is past experience.
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Hence the expression: Live and learn.
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We have managed to survive many many years without doing much in the way of protection. Why do you have a belief that the future will be any different from the past?
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Retaliation is inevitable.
Maybe we should focus on what we can do: end the cronyism in DC and defend our borders. We can afford to do that.
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Because nobody will take security seriously until something bad happens?
Well, no. It's because the document wasn't actually sensitive. Anyone who actually might want to cripple our infrastructure already knows how to do that, because they have access to satellite imagery like everyone else. Also, not being complete fucking idiots, they know how to read the reports that all corporations are required to file which include information on things like new construction projects, including their function and location.
The truth is that most U.S. cities get their power via just one or t
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You have no idea is anyone is really trying. None of us do.
That is a typically ignorant thing to say. I wrote "incredibly" but I must be new here if I think that. It's fucking trivial, and it hasn't happened, which is how we know no one is trying.
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We should worry about where bad events could happen.
How much we should worry depends on the probability and the scale of the impact of the bad event.
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How much we should worry depends on the probability and the scale of the impact of the bad event.
This was mostly like one drunk teenager. To extrapolate from this one-off incident, and conclude that we need to spend a trillion dollars to harden every piece of infrastructure is silly. People are advocating the spending because they hope to get a slice of it. If we are going to spend money to harden our infrastructure, we should be focused on high probability incidents like lightening strikes, and not bullets. The bullet problem should be dealt with by making it more difficult for teenagers to buy be
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"This was mostly like one drunk teenager. "
i wish you were right on this. this attack was no drunken stunt. it was deliberate and calculated. i advocate hardening our vital infrastructure and i don't get any piece of the pie. the power grid goes down for any length of time, people are going to die.
ignore and hide from the facts all you like it won't change the fact that people around the world wish to do us harm and are working to do so.
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it was deliberate and calculated.
The people spinning the "deliberate and calculated" interpretation are the same people that benefit from increased security spending. According to William of Ockham [slashdot.org], it was a drunk teenager.
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drunk teenager is not the answer with the fewest assumptions if you take into account the facts.
"involved snipping AT&T fiber-optic lines to knock out phone and 911 service in the area and firing shots into a PG&E substation."
how do you get drunk teenager from that? from your years as a wild youth coordinating safe ingress and egress from locations allowing deliberate phone line sabotage and long range high powered rifle targeting intermediate power supply stations on a whim after too many beers?
th
One drunk teenager with Hulk strength (Score:1)
drunk teenager is not the answer with the fewest assumptions if you take into account the facts.
"involved snipping AT&T fiber-optic lines to knock out phone and 911 service in the area and firing shots into a PG&E substation."
how do you get drunk teenager from that? from your years as a wild youth coordinating safe ingress and egress from locations allowing deliberate phone line sabotage and long range high powered rifle targeting intermediate power supply stations on a whim after too many beers?
the only razor applied here was the one to any hint of sanity.
Access to the fiber-optic lines that were damaged included lifting a 200 or 300 lb metal manhole cover. I doubt one person could have done this.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
The morons of the Survivalist or Militia movements could take down the entire US electrical grid tomorrow were they able to stop fighting amongst themselves long enough. A score of more-or-less simultaneous strikes like this spread at random across the country would crash the grid, hard. You don't need inside information, deep understanding of the power distribution system, electrical engineering training, financing, or high tech weaponry, nothing more than a watch, a deer rifle and a vehicle to get you there. Electrical engineers have been complaining about this for well over two decades, but since making the grid more resilient will cost money the suits don't want to listen. If Al Qaeda were really what the gov't has tried to convince us they were you'd be without power several days a week.
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The morons of the Survivalist or Militia movements could take down the entire US electrical grid tomorrow
Yet there is no evidence that they are planning to do so, or that they have any motive to do so. The plan you describe would require the covert cooperation of hundreds people that you describe as "morons", without a single one leaking the plan. How likely is that?
Electrical engineers have been complaining about this for well over two decades
Chicken Little has been making predictions even longer than that.
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Hundreds? How many people do you think it takes to fire a hunting rifle? Or did you not know that A Score = 20?
There are a LOT of people who dislike the US at this point, including Mexican drug cartels, survivors of US military massacres in Iraq and Afghanistan, Russian mafiosos, and a number of governments, and we're not making any more friends either. Of course there's also the possibility, no, the certainty of another Carrington Event. For that matter, currency and futures speculators could make a
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Of course there's also the possibility, no, the certainty of another Carrington Event.
There is also the certainty that their will, eventually, be another school stabbing like we had this week. So should every student wear a hockey mask and knife proof vest? There are BILLIONS of places where a rifle shot could cause damage. Yet it almost never happens. Lightning strikes are a thousand times more likely. Instead of trying to think of a million scenarios where a trillion in spending could prevent some black swan event, it would be far better to spend that money on flexible rapid response
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Lightning strike is a point event, a local area disrupted temporarily. Remember the big blackout in the northeast a few years ago? Most of the physical damage was repaired or re-routed around in a day, the reason that it took a week for power to be fully restored is because it takes that long to recreate and rebalance all the energy flow. It's almost all manual, very little automation in the process, and entailed overtime by all the available specialists in the field throughout the entire region, bringin
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"There are BILLIONS of places where a rifle shot could cause damage."
damage in the thousands? how many places where it would cause damage in the tens or hundreds of millions? 1000?
100k to harden each place preventing it and saving lives? that's only 1 billion spent, .01% of a yearly federal budget and well worth it...
but if you feel superior throwing around your favorite term "drunken teenager" i guess post more bullshit.
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Hell, some of the more maladjusted friends of mine from my High School graduating class could pull that off. One doesn't even need to get the Survivalist or Militia movements to put off their infighting.. You just need a few angry, maladjusted people around the country who share the idea at the same time.
Fortunately, I've explained to all of them why terrorism doesn't work.
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If you don't design security in when you build critical infrastructure, and take proper security measures along the way, you open the door to bad things happening more easily.
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Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been thinking about this a lot as I listen to Kevin Mitnick's autobio, Ghost in the Wires. He devotes his entire life to circumventing various defenses, then laughs at everybody for being 'so easily' fooled. His entire view is basically juvenile - that everything (such as the phone system) just naturally exists and ought to be perfect, so it's amazing if he can prove otherwise. When in fact nobody ever said it was. All the stuff that exists and usually works is just the product of mostly ordinary people doing their 9-5 jobs and trying to keep the wheels turning until their shift ends so they can go home and do something else.
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" Making the entire grid literally bullet proof" is a straw man. Nobody is thinking of that, and it isn't really possible. What is possible and reasonable is hardening critical infrastructure, improving redundancy, and making it easier to repair. If all you are prepared to do is cut cables and shoot a high power rifle that isn't going to get you very far very quickly against some elementary precautions for various parts of the infrastructure.
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Depends on the consequences of something bad happening.
Finding out the next flavor of Ben and Gerry's ice cream? Not such a big deal.
Finding out exactly where you can strike critical infrastructure by getting your report about how vulnerable the critical infrastructure is? Absolutely.
If you knew that the information was sensitive, and you didn't safeguard it ... then, I would argue you really missed the point.
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TV news is generally forgettable, but two TV news reports from the '90s really stood out for me:
1. After a series of brush fires considered likely to be arson, a reporter stood in front of a canyon, named the location, and reported the fire dept was saying it would be particularly dangerous if someone started a fire in this canyon or others similar to it, because of reasons X, Y, and Z ...
2. After several kids were hospitalized after ingesting jimson weed tea, the news report warned kids not to make jimson
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It is 20 million times more profitable to finance weapon industries by going to war and preparing for attacks, than it is to encourage people to jog daily, except in very hot weather.
Thus "War is a Racket" (Score:2)
By Marine Major General Smedley Butler: http://www.ratical.org/ratvill... [ratical.org]
"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the bene
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Re:Link? (Score:4, Funny)
Here you go [wordpress.org]
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Hm. $250k per week is 'only' $13M per year.
Lots of CEOs in CA make that. In fact, all of the 100 highest paid CEOs make that.
http://www.aflcio.org/Corporat... [aflcio.org]
It must be good to be a gangsta.
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That much? (Score:3)
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Not sure exactly what lines but, if I remember right, distribution lines are in the 13kV range.... you don't just "cut" them with a pair of dykes. The result of the connection being disrupted can generate some amazing sparks. Electricians who work on circuits like that wear protective suits:
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
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Could be, though we don't know for sure if they actually knew this (not unlikely) or if they just got lucky in having chosen a method which was both accessible and didn't expose them to personal danger. Certainly, if they didn't know this, and chose different methods, they may not have gotten past the first one.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:Simplified "homeland security" (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing I get is why not just have the government run security for them in the first place?
That's what I don't get about breeder reactors. People argue that terrorists will get their hands on weapons-grade materials. So instead we plan to bury tons of waste underground if we ever find a place we can store it, at a cost of billions of dollars.
It would make a lot more sense to just stick the breeder reactors in the middle of army bases. Security isn't THAT hard of a problem since we already guard actual functional nuclear warheads. Surely if the terrorists can't get their hands on those, we can protect some fuel located in the middle of a reactor core under boiling water which is only n% weapons-grade material.
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It's probably because the "problem of proliferation" is repeated over again as if it were a mantra. The purpose of mantra is to transform the practitioners mind. Proliferation awareness has now transcended most parts of the population to a whole new level of being.
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1. Declare certain sites strategic risk sites which means their security personnel have heightened authority to detain and shoot suspects similar to sensitive federal facilities.
Oh, you mean like the constitution free zones [aclu.org] which are at the border and cover the majority of americans? And that was recently upheld in court? [foxnews.com] I'm sure that will never get abused by the government.
LOL (Score:2)
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These attacks have cost them 10s to 100s of millions. Yet, they are only willing to put up .25M. This shows how poorly ran American companies are today.
The amount of money they offer for a reward only has to be high enough to make it worthwhile for someone who has information to come forward. The amount of money they lost in the attack is really irrelevant. It's not like they'll get that money back if there's a conviction.
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But you could get $50 and a pizza party... with a chance to win an iPad!
Spin the wheel! Weeeeeewwwow!
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Given the size of transmission-line towers, the guy in the van would need a rather large bomb to actually make the tower collapse. Multiply by the number of towers he'd need to destroy, and I think that one van might not be large enough. Also, getting your hands on that quantity of explosives isn't easy or cheap.
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Nah, if you know your stuff, it takes quite small amount of explosives properly placed to bring down something like those towers.
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Not really, just a roll of det cord and some foil backed duct tape with a box of fuses.
In the west in rural areas, getting your hands on that is relatively simple.
It does require training however.
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The train system is even more vulnerable and more accessible for mayhem with less risk of accidental electrocution.
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The simple truth is that most people are too busy trying to run their own lives to go around making other peoples miserable. Of those who are determined to do so, most either become traffic wardens or run for political office.
Oceans the next one (Score:2)
If terrorism/sabotage was a real threat... (Score:5, Insightful)
...wouldn't we have seen it by now?
Despite the alphabet soup of government agencies, surveillance and Federal laws, America is a pretty easy place to move around and generally maintain a low profile. And many "critical infrastructure" sites really aren't well defended/guarded -- take your pick, a handful of people with nominal skill and training could cause all manner of chaos.
If the risk of attack was really that great, why haven't we seen it by now?
I always hesitate to ask this question and post too many specific examples for fear of attracting the wrong kind of attention, but let's just take oil refining as an example. The last time they closed a refinery down for maintenance two states away, the price of gas here shot up quite a bit -- we all hear the stories about inadequate refinery capacity. So what happens if 3 or 4 refineries go offline at the same time in close geographic proximity? Are we talking just a buck a gallon price hike, or are we talking shortages worse than the infamous 1970s gas lines along with all the attendant economic disruption?
I think if there were people intent on doing real damage, we would have seen it by now. It's a trivial armchair exercise to think of things that make you go "whoa!" And if you think of actual, organized sabotage involving direct state sponsorship and not just theocratic nutjobs the scenarios get even worse because you're now talking training that goes beyond emptying AK-47s in the desert.
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It is really sad all the money that we waste, when most of it won't stop something so miniscule yet effective.
Considering what it cost to put that op on (Score:1)
considering what it cost in terms of training, logistics, coordination, surveillance, and equipment to do this, the reward is not very much.
The op itself cost more than that, all those things considered.
Oh, by the way, no, you're not safe.
Ever.
There is no such thing as safety, only living in fear because you want to believe in magic rainbow unicorns.
FIND THEM (Score:2)
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I don't think, it is fair to accuse a corporation of "shoddy work", when it took an armed group — sophisticated enough to be still at large — to cause the mayhem.
Or do you want each power-transmission mast to be guarded by soldiers? What about fiber-optic cables, which were cut — should that too be patrolled by the military — the alternative to "corporations" you despise so much? To me the "cu
WHO's the REAL threat? hmmmmmm?! (Score:2)
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According to TFA, the terror attack included snipers shooting at the electrical equipment. That's not "imaginary", that's as real as it gets.
A hard-working and benevolent (as opposite to "lazy and greed") corporation would've been just as helpless against a determined group of attackers like that.
Putting toothpaste back into tube? (Score:2)
A little late to be scrubbing them now that the information is out there... Better beg
Video (Score:1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I read a discussion online that taking out key substations in the LA asre3a would collapse the grid, it's amazing just how vulnerable we really are.
Imagine LA with no power for 2 weeks.
People vs. property (Score:1)
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There is a $250k reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in this property damage case.
Well, that's because PG&E cares. Who cares that people get shot at on the highway?
So, how bad was it? (Score:2)
$15 million in damage, but who lost power and for how long?
Well designed systems have redundancies. Go ahead. Shoot out a couple of transformers. We'll just switch sources. The interesting thing will be if this reward gets someone caught. That might be the best economic solution. There's only so much security you can build in to a system. But if it becomes known that you will be caught, and possibly based on evidence provided by your co-conspirators, people will think twice before pulling this crap.
As to
I wonder what the reward was... (Score:2)
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I wonder what the reward was...
Pretty damn high. Enron went bankrupt anyway.
250K reward. (Score:2)
Why not call the Feds and ask them what SEAL team they sent for a "dry run" wouldn't that be faster?
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or how about the SF anti-gentrification movement that seems to be targeting tech workers?
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