Electricity Grid in U.S. Penetrated by Spies

[nmap]

Discussion in the WSJ about an existing vulnerability.

To add perspective on the degree of vulnerability, please consider assignment 5 from chapter 5 of a college textbook for undergraduates enrolled in an introductory course about computers in society. A great many people are aware of the general methods and procedures involved - though the links to be provided will not include such specifics. It is my contention that such knowledge is pervasive, again as evidenced by the instructor materials at the link below.

LINK

Here's the WSJ article:

LINK

Electricity Grid in U.S. Penetrated by Spies

By SIOBHAN GORMAN

Associated PressRobert Moran monitors an electric grid in Dallas. Such infrastructure grids across the country are vulnerable to cyberattacks.
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WASHINGTON -- Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials.

The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven't sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.

"The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid," said a senior intelligence official. "So have the Russians."

The espionage appeared pervasive across the U.S. and doesn't target a particular company or region, said a former Department of Homeland Security official. "There are intrusions, and they are growing," the former official said, referring to electrical systems. "There were a lot last year."

DiscussHow worried are you that a cyberattack could damage U.S. infrastructure?.
Many of the intrusions were detected not by the companies in charge of the infrastructure but by U.S. intelligence agencies, officials said. Intelligence officials worry about cyber attackers taking control of electrical facilities, a nuclear power plant or financial networks via the Internet.

Authorities investigating the intrusions have found software tools left behind that could be used to destroy infrastructure components, the senior intelligence official said. He added, "If we go to war with them, they will try to turn them on."

Officials said water, sewage and other infrastructure systems also were at risk.

"Over the past several years, we have seen cyberattacks against critical infrastructures abroad, and many of our own infrastructures are as vulnerable as their foreign counterparts, " Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair recently told lawmakers. "A number of nations, including Russia and China, can disrupt elements of the U.S. information infrastructure."

Officials cautioned that the motivation of the cyberspies wasn't well understood, and they don't see an immediate danger. China, for example, has little incentive to disrupt the U.S. economy because it relies on American consumers and holds U.S. government debt.

But protecting the electrical grid and other infrastructure is a key part of the Obama administration's cybersecurity review, which is to be completed next week. Under the Bush administration, Congress approved $17 billion in secret funds to protect government networks, according to people familiar with the budget. The Obama administration is weighing whether to expand the program to address vulnerabilities in private computer networks, which would cost billions of dollars more. A senior Pentagon official said Tuesday the Pentagon has spent $100 million in the past six months repairing cyber damage.

Overseas examples show the potential havoc. In 2000, a disgruntled employee rigged a computerized control system at a water-treatment plant in Australia, releasing more than 200,000 gallons of sewage into parks, rivers and the grounds of a Hyatt hotel.

Last year, a senior Central Intelligence Agency official, Tom Donohue, told a meeting of utility company representatives in New Orleans that a cyberattack had taken out power equipment in multiple regions outside the U.S. The outage was followed with extortion demands, he said.

The U.S. electrical grid comprises three separate electric networks, covering the East, the West and Texas. Each includes many thousands of miles of transmission lines, power plants and substations. The flow of power is controlled by local utilities or regional transmission organizations. The growing reliance of utilities on Internet-based communication has increased the vulnerability of control systems to spies and hackers, according to government reports.

The sophistication of the U.S. intrusions -- which extend beyond electric to other key infrastructure systems -- suggests that China and Russia are mainly responsible, according to intelligence officials and cybersecurity specialists. While terrorist groups could develop the ability to penetrate U.S. infrastructure, they don't appear to have yet mounted attacks, these officials say.

It is nearly impossible to know whether or not an attack is government-sponsored because of the difficulty in tracking true identities in cyberspace. U.S. officials said investigators have followed electronic trails of stolen data to China and Russia.

Russian and Chinese officials have denied any wrongdoing. "These are pure speculations," said Yevgeniy Khorishko, a spokesman at the Russian Embassy. "Russia has nothing to do with the cyberattacks on the U.S. infrastructure, or on any infrastructure in any other country in the world."

A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, Wang Baodong, said the Chinese government "resolutely oppose[s] any crime, including hacking, that destroys the Internet or computer network" and has laws barring the practice. China was ready to cooperate with other countries to counter such attacks, he said, and added that "some people overseas with Cold War mentality are indulged in fabricating the sheer lies of the so-called cyberspies in China."

Utilities are reluctant to speak about the dangers. "Much of what we've done, we can't talk about," said Ray Dotter, a spokesman at PJM Interconnection LLC, which coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity in 13 states and the District of Columbia. He said the organization has beefed up its security, in conformance with federal standards.

In January 2008, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved new protection measures that required improvements in the security of computer servers and better plans for handling attacks.

Last week, Senate Democrats introduced a proposal that would require all critical infrastructure companies to meet new cybersecurity standards and grant the president emergency powers over control of the grid systems and other infrastructure.

Specialists at the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a nonprofit research institute, said attack programs search for openings in a network, much as a thief tests locks on doors. Once inside, these programs and their human controllers can acquire the same access and powers as a systems administrator.

NERC LetterThe North American Electric Reliability Corporation on Tuesday warned its members that not all of them appear to be adhering to cybersecuirty requirements. Read the letter.
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The White House review of cybersecurity programs is studying ways to shield the electrical grid from such attacks, said James Lewis, who directed a study for the Center for Strategic and International Studies and has met with White House reviewers.

The reliability of the grid is ultimately the responsibility of the North American Electric Reliability Corp., an independent standards-setting organization overseen by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The NERC set standards last year requiring companies to designate "critical cyber assets." Companies, for example, must check the backgrounds of employees and install firewalls to separate administrative networks from those that control electricity flow. The group will begin auditing compliance in July.

—Rebecca Smith contributed to this article.

[Richard]

FWIW - there are a lot of 'soft' targets in any free society and this is nothing new. We all know what they are - and so do our enemies.

Richard's $.02

[mac117]

We constantly make movies about altering the financial market, electrical grids, traffic patterns, water and air ways.....why shouldn't a foreign adversary seek to do this? Hell, we've shown them how.

[The Reaper]

This is not surprising, but is BAD news.

We, as a society are virtually totally dependent on plentiful, reliable, and cheap electricity.

It would appear that we may not be able to count on it for much longer.

Prudent Americans will start considering alternatives, and making plans.

TR

[smp52]

Originally Posted by The Reaper

Prudent Americans will start considering alternatives, and making plans.

Along the lines of what you state, I thought the following blog post on micro-power was interesting...

Resilient communities: Micro Power

EDIT: URL corrected, should work.

[The Reaper]

Originally Posted by smp52

Along the lines of what you state, I thought the following blog post on micro-power was interesting...

Resilient Community: Micro-power

Bad URL.

TR

[Paslode]

Originally Posted by The Reaper

This is not surprising, but is BAD news.

We, as a society are virtually totally dependent on plentiful, reliable, and cheap electricity.

It would appear that we may not be able to count on it for much longer.

Prudent Americans will start considering alternatives, and making plans.

TR

TR,

Quite a few people I know have connected an exterior 220v recepticle to their existing breaker panel which they can then run a heavy cable from the generator to the recepticle and thus they have the capability of running their basic needs, refrigerator, gas furnance and possibly a few lights.

Only catch is you 'MUST' shut the breaker off prior to connecting the generator as the feed....and fuel.

How viable an option in your opinion, is a portable 5000 to 6500 watt gas generator as a basic needs electrical source used in this manner for such a senario as is being discussed?

[bravo22b]

Originally Posted by Paslode

TR,

Quite a few people I know have connected an exterior 220v recepticle to their existing breaker panel which they can then run a heavy cable from the generator to the recepticle and thus they have the capability of running their basic needs, refrigerator, gas furnance and possibly a few lights.

Only catch is you 'MUST' shut the breaker off prior to connecting the generator as the feed....and fuel.

How viable an option in your opinion, is a portable 5000 to 6500 watt gas generator as a basic needs electrical source used in this manner for such a senario as is being discussed?

This may be a common technique, but does not conform to the National Electrical Code, which requires a transfer device which must prevent the simultaneous connection of generator and utility power. This commonly means a separate breaker subpanel in which you put the circuits you plan on powering during an emergency, and a transfer switch that powers the subpanel with either generator power or utility power, but cannot accidentally have both at the same time. These transfer switches can be automatic, switching to generator power when a power failure is detected.

There are a lot of reasons for this, but an important one is to prevent electrocuting an unsuspecting utility worker who is not expecting power to be coming backwards from the house to the pole when he shows up to re-connect your electricity. Another reason is so that you can more easily control the amount of power draw to your generator (in other words, size your subpanel load to your generator capacity) to avoid damaging your generator.

Again, I realize that backfeeding your panel is a common technique, and in theory, if you are that conscientious person who knows enough about electricity and cares enough to do the right procedures ALL THE TIME, it is an OK practice. However, Murphy is always lurking, and someone can get hurt or killed. We all know what bad electrical practices have done to our fellow servicemembers overseas.

Not to beat a dead horse, but there are a lot of subtleties to electrical work that may not be obvious to the homeowner or amateur electrician. The reasons behind certain codes or procedures may not be apparent, but most of the time, they are for very good reasons.

[The Reaper]

Originally Posted by Paslode

TR,

Quite a few people I know have connected an exterior 220v recepticle to their existing breaker panel which they can then run a heavy cable from the generator to the recepticle and thus they have the capability of running their basic needs, refrigerator, gas furnance and possibly a few lights.

Only catch is you 'MUST' shut the breaker off prior to connecting the generator as the feed....and fuel.

How viable an option in your opinion, is a portable 5000 to 6500 watt gas generator as a basic needs electrical source used in this manner for such a senario as is being discussed?

That is the size gas generator I am currently running. I have a large panel with a manual switch that cuts the feed from the utility company and throws power to a second main panel with primarily emergency circuits in it.

I want to upgrade to an LP powered unit though.

Sizing is the real issue. A larger generator running at 50% load burns more energy than a smaller unit at a higher load. I need to total up the load for the circuits I want to energize, like the refrigerator, freezer, microwave, fans, a battery charger bank, selected lights and wall outlets, etc., decide what I can unplug occasionally to throw a heavy load on, like a hot water heater for an hour or so, and determine what size unit I ultimately need.

I would anticipate running it for a few hours in the morning, and a few in the evening, not 24/7. I have enough gas in the vehicles to run the genset on the above part-time schedule for at least a couple of weeks.

Hopefully, a bank of 12v. deep-cycle batteries, with an inverter or two, can provide me with any 24/7 needs and save the generator fuel for the surge periods. I do have a few solar panels, but they are just for recharging AA batteries, and even that is tasking them. When the generator fuel is low, if the emergency has not been resolved, then you could drop back to a very limited load for the battery bank and work to keep it charged.

An idea worth exploring would be a windmill generator, you could fab one up perhaps with a heavy duty vehicle alternator providing supplemental charge power to the battery bank. You could duplicate the system with a bicycle turning a similar generator set up to recharge the batteries if the wind was uncooperative or you needed more power. A hydro-electric generator would work if you have the water source and a water wheel.

Solar cells are currently just too expensive to be practical for anything but remote, low power requirements.

Solar hot water could be viable though.

HTH.

TR

[Paslode]

Originally Posted by bravo22b

This may be a common technique, but does not conform to the National Electrical Code, which requires a transfer device which must prevent the simultaneous connection of generator and utility power. This commonly means a separate breaker subpanel in which you put the circuits you plan on powering during an emergency, and a transfer switch that powers the subpanel with either generator power or utility power, but cannot accidentally have both at the same time. These transfer switches can be automatic, switching to generator power when a power failure is detected.

There are a lot of reasons for this, but an important one is to prevent electrocuting an unsuspecting utility worker who is not expecting power to be coming backwards from the house to the pole when he shows up to re-connect your electricity. Another reason is so that you can more easily control the amount of power draw to your generator (in other words, size your subpanel load to your generator capacity) to avoid damaging your generator.

Again, I realize that backfeeding your panel is a common technique, and in theory, if you are that conscientious person who knows enough about electricity and cares enough to do the right procedures ALL THE TIME, it is an OK practice. However, Murphy is always lurking, and someone can get hurt or killed. We all know what bad electrical practices have done to our fellow servicemembers overseas.

Not to beat a dead horse, but there are a lot of subtleties to electrical work that may not be obvious to the homeowner or amateur electrician. The reasons behind certain codes or procedures may not be apparent, but most of the time, they are for very good reasons.

Very, very true. For most folks a call to 'Licensed Electrician' would be well advised, tell them what you want to do, what you plan on running and they will get you setup safely.

[nmap]

Originally Posted by Richard

FWIW - there are a lot of 'soft' targets in any free society and this is nothing new. We all know what they are - and so do our enemies.

Richard's $.02

Sir, I'm sure you're right. And yet, the great mass of people may not know.

The reason this situation may be a problem requires a bit of background...

A friend and previous colleague created a computer honey-pot - basically, a computer that appears to be part of an active system, but isn't really. Its purpose is to study what hackers do and how they do it - thus, it is completely benign in application. It sits and waits, providing a target for hackers to attack. The system was running an unpatched version of Redhat Linux.

Anyway, it was compromised within 8 hours. Two hackers even attacked each other on the little system.

The point of interest is that the attacks came (as nearly as anyone could tell) from Romania - but they were routed through a South Korean girl's school. The likely scenario is that the school had an insecure system which the hackers used as an intermediate point in their attack.

And that brings us to the public. There are more and more systems that are connected and active 24/7, and which may be vulnerable to compromise, just as the school was. However, the technical information that might help someone avoid or prevent an attack is seldom discussed anywhere - so the public isn't aware of a potential problem. Of course, the same public often fails to read the manual anyway, so perhaps I'm guilty of over optimism.

[Richard]

And is anyone here naive enough to think we're not working to protect our systems while going after their networks, too?

And in the 'nothing new' category:

Our ODA was on a month-long GW exercise in Northern Arizona in the fall of 1972. Once our G's were ready and we were given some DA missions, one of our targets was a microwave telephone relay atop one of the mountain peaks near Flagstaff. We raided the securely fenced target at O'Dark-thirty without encountering any resistance and left our dummy charges on key components of the facility. The security for the site had been alerted to the increased possibility of sabotage, but not by whom or when. Sometime later, a site security guard stumbled upon one of our charges placed on a large propane tank to power the auxilliary power generators, sounded the alarm, and shut down the facility - causing an NCA level panic - until they located all of our charges and had determined they were not a threat. We made Jack Anderson's column in the Washington Post citing the vulnerability of our electronic communications networks to saboteurs because the destruction of the microwave relay would have cut all such communications between that point and to the W/SW of that point. Because we were in the mountains for a couple of more weeks, we didn't find out about all the foofarah we'd caused - and it was quite considerable - until we were extracted.

As the old saying goes, the more things change...

Richard's $.02

[nmap]

It seems I have even more to learn than I thought.

Thank you for your patience, and for the story.

[ZonieDiver]

Originally Posted by Richard

And is anyone here naive enough to think we're not working to protect our systems while going after their networks, too?

And in the 'nothing new' category:

Our ODA was on a month-long GW exercise in Northern Arizona in the fall of 1972. Once our G's were ready and we were given some DA missions, one of our targets was a microwave telephone relay atop one of the mountain peaks near Flagstaff. We raided the securely fenced target at O'Dark-thirty without encountering any resistance and left our dummy charges on key components of the facility. The security for the site had been alerted to the increased possibility of sabotage, but not by whom or when. Sometime later, a site security guard stumbled upon one of our charges placed on a large propane tank to power the auxilliary power generators, sounded the alarm, and shut down the facility - causing an NCA level panic - until they located all of our charges and had determined they were not a threat. We made Jack Anderson's column in the Washington Post citing the vulnerability of our electronic communications networks to saboteurs because the destruction of the microwave relay would have cut all such communications between that point and to the W/SW of that point. Because we were in the mountains for a couple of more weeks, we didn't find out about all the foofarah we'd caused - and it was quite considerable - until we were extracted.

As the old saying goes, the more things change...

Richard's $.02

By any chance, were those dummy charges actually "feminine hygiene" products? While up there in N AZ, did you spend any time in a large barn housing rafts for river running, etc. and associate with a relative of the president of the local state university? Just wonderin'...

[Richard]

Originally Posted by ZonieDiver

By any chance, were those dummy charges actually "feminine hygiene" products? While up there in N AZ, did you spend any time in a large barn housing rafts for river running, etc. and associate with a relative of the president of the local state university? Just wonderin'...

Nope - sand filled C ration boxes wrapped with friction tape and training M3 push-pull non-electric firing devices with white plastic covered cotton rope (used for clotheslines) for simulated det cord. We wrote "BOOM" with a red marker on the bottom of each of the charges. Looked real - at least the security guards thought so.

Richard's $.02