Oh, Please! Terror Propaganda

[rs]

gOD I hate this crap. It works because so few people understand high school physics...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070927/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/hacking_the_grid_10

US Video shows hacker hit on power grid

By TED BRIDIS and EILEEN SULLIVAN, Associated Press Writers 34 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - A government video shows the potential destruction caused by hackers seizing control of a crucial part of the U.S. electrical grid: an industrial turbine spinning wildly out of control until it becomes a smoking hulk and power shuts down.

The video, produced for the Homeland Security Department and obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday, was marked "Official Use Only." It shows commands quietly triggered by simulated hackers having such a violent reaction that the enormous turbine shudders as pieces fly apart and it belches black-and-white smoke.

The video was produced for top U.S. policy makers by the Idaho National Laboratory, which has studied the little-understood risks to the specialized electronic equipment that operates power, water and chemical plants. Vice President Dick Cheney is among those who have watched the video, said one U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity because this official was not authorized to publicly discuss such high-level briefings.

"They've taken a theoretical attack and they've shown in a very demonstrable way the impact you can have using cyber means and cyber techniques against this type of infrastructure," said Amit Yoran, former U.S. cybersecurity chief for the Bush administration. Yoran is chief executive for NetWitness Corp., which sells sophisticated network monitoring software.

"It's so graphic," Yoran said. "Talking about bits and bytes doesn't have the same impact as seeing something catch fire."

The electrical attack never actually happened. The recorded demonstration, called the "Aurora Generator Test," was conducted in March by government researchers investigating a dangerous vulnerability in computers at U.S. utility companies known as supervisory control and data acquisition systems. The programming flaw was quietly fixed, and equipment-makers urged utilities to take protective measures.

Translation: "We are making this up."

There was no evidence any U.S. utility company suffered damage from hackers or terrorists using this technique, U.S. officials said. But these officials cautioned that affected systems are not routinely monitored as closely as many modern corporate computer networks, so there would be little forensic evidence to study after such a break-in.

Industry experts cautioned that intruders would need specialized knowledge to carry out such attacks, including the ability to turn off warning systems.

"The video is not a realistic representation of how the power system would operate," said Stan Johnson, a manager at the North American Electric Reliability Corp., the Princeton, N.J.-based organization charged with overseeing the power grid.

Translation: "When all else fails, manipulate the data."

A top Homeland Security Department official, Robert Jamison, said companies are working to limit such attacks.

"Is this something we should be concerned about? Yes," said Jamison, who oversees the department's cybersecurity division. "But we've taken a lot of risk off the table."

President Bush's top telecommunications advisers concluded years ago that an organization such as a foreign intelligence service or a well-funded terror group "could conduct a structured attack on the electric power grid electronically, with a high degree of anonymity, and without having to set foot in the target nation." Ominously, the Idaho National Laboratory — which produced the new video — has described the risk as "the invisible threat."

Experts said the affected systems were not developed with security in mind.

"What keeps your lights on are some very, very old technology," said Joe Weiss, a security expert who has testified before Congress about such threats. "If you can get access to these systems, you can conceptually cause them to do whatever it is you want them to do."

The Homeland Security Department has been working with industries, especially electrical and nuclear companies, to enhance security measures. The electric industry is still working on their internal assessments and plans, but the nuclear sector has implemented its security measures at all its plants, the government said.

In July the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission proposed a set of standards to help protect the country's bulk electric power supply system from cyber attacks. These standards would require certain users, owners and operators of power grids to establish plans and controls.

I am an electrical engineer. In college, I took a class about machines. In this specific case the class is "how a DC electric motor (generator) works".

One of the less-than-obvious results about a DC electric motor is that the rotational speed of the motor is inversely proportional to the field strength. This means that a electric motor has a winding that generates a magnetic field. When you apply electric power to the winding on the armature (the thing that rotates) it, well, rotates. The speed at which it rotates is proportional to how hard the magnetic fields push against each other. It turns out that if you reduce the field winding magnetic field, the armature tends to want to push harder.

Again it is not obvious, but if you reduce the current to the field winding, the armature turns faster. Now what happens if you reduce the field winding current to zero? Well, the armature wants to turn at infinite RPM. Needless to say, this is incompatible with a working motor... (or at least shortly after the field winding current goes to zero).

To "prove" the point, the professor took us into the motor lab where this large motor (that could move an electric train...) was connected to a power supply. He had his hands on two switches, one supplied power to the field winding, the other supplied power to the armature. He powered up the motor, and it spun like you would expect.

Then he removed the field winding power. Instantly the motor began to "wind up" and you could tell that in a very short period something was going to happen. Needless to say, very shortly after removing the winding power, the professor removed the armature power and the motor slowed to a halt. (The alternative was to allow the motor to self destruct, in which case the result would have been that one or more students in the class would die...). All of us students were sufficiently impressed.

So the point is that generating this video is trivial, the smoke is real, but the circumstances are fake.

What *would have been* real is if someone used a PC on the internet to hack into the power site and demonstrate that, yes, it really is possible to do this from a remote computer.

But of course this is not *actually* possible, so the demonstration had to be faked.

Oh, by the way, Be afraid. Be very afraid. Osama is under your bed.

 

[GRiM]

I agree Rs!
It was quite recently that I understood that some people really think that al-ciaida hides in there closet and can destroy or infiltrate a high-security complex like a military bio-lab. and or nuclear-facility. I didn't think people seriously thought that the afghan-mountain warriors had satellite-space/'starwars' weapons and could do such things that the media sometimes claim.
I mean, common sense and a bit of knowledge will take you far for example the liquid bomb 'they' were going to explode on planes and so on.. All this and they motivate it with the freedom-hating part, the ultimate irony looking at our current society.

(Grrr)

 

[Tarri]

I have been told by my brother who works for ATT that the things that cuts power more often than weather, or human mistakes are Squirrels. They some how end up blowing transformers. He says it happens more often than we know. So..... you know what that means? Well, that Osama is training Squirrels. Boy, he's clever!