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Power grid risk makes Wood wish for Depends

By Gearhead, NetworkWorld.com, 03/11/05

According to a piece in the Washington Post, Officials at the Energy Department's Idaho National Laboratory showed Patrick H. Wood III, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, how a skilled hacker could cause serious problems in the national power grid. Wood declined to comment on specifics of what he saw but describing his reaction to the demonstration, Wood said: "I wished I'd had a diaper on."

Curiously, not everyone is as convinced ...

The part that made us wince was: "James Andrew Lewis, director of technology policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the District, said a coordinated attack on the grid would be technically difficult and would not provide as much 'bang for the buck' as high-profile physical attacks."

We must be missing something here ... how couldn't taking out the power to potentially millions of American homes for what could be days or weeks by using a remote attack not give an incredible bang for the buck (or perhaps more accurately, discharge for the dinar).

We're not alone in thinking that Lewis's statement sounds a little optimistic: The same article cites a report issued last year by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that came to the conclusion that a foreign intelligence service or a well-supported terrorist 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." No kidding.

The same article continued: "A sophisticated hacker, which is probably a group of hackers . . . could probably get into each of the three U.S. North American power [networks] and could probably bring sections of it down if they knew how to do it," said Richard A. Clarke, a former counterterrorism chief in the Clinton and Bush administrations."

"If they knew how to do it"?! This strikes us as a remarkably vacuous thing to say. Terrorists could presumably also dance Swan Lake or perform brain surgery if they knew how to do it.

The article concludes by quoting O. Sami Saydjari, chief executive of consulting firm Cyber Defense Agency LLC: "I am absolutely confident that by design, someone could do at least as [much damage], if not worse [than the blackout that knocked out electricity to about 50 million people in the Northeast, Midwest and Canada in 2003] ... it's just a matter of time before we have a serious event."

Time to buy a generator.

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