With the recent attacks by ransomware hacking against the oil pipeline and now with the meat packing industry I say some intelligent people wondering why they attack those things instead of the power grid.
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In my industry (Network Engineering) I am following a lot of hacking and security breaches on a fairly regular basis. Most of the time I am just dealing with attempts to compromise the networks I am in charge of. I can tell you that such attacks are so numerous now that I don't see how any particular agency is staying on top of them. If you get caught hacking some very wealthy firm with contacts in some agency then you might be in trouble. For most of us if they compromise our machines they are not going to do anything about it. It's up to you.
There are vast quantities of compromised machines, and devices connected to the internet all over the world. Some of these if they are not simply script kiddies (using tools other people made without being able to make those tools themselves) then they know to not brute force or take actions that will make people pay attention. Do a little here. Move on to another project. Come back a little later and do a little more. By this slow roll they manage to acquire assets they control all over the world. Each such asset can also be used to compromise other assets. What I mean by this is they can then use those compromised assets to make the connections to try to compromise others. If it is noticed and traced back then the investigators will only find a compromised machine. It's owner most likely being oblivious. If they trace it back further they eventually will likely encounter one or more VPNs which can amount to dead ends. This is especially true if the VPN provider has a no logs policy.
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Why does all of this matter?
What do they need to do these things?
Internet.
What does the internet need?
Electricity.
What happens if they take down the power grid?
They lose access to all of the compromised assets. They no longer can attack the pipelines, meat factories, insurance companies, banks, laboratories, universities, etc.
We are in an information war. If they can steal research that is worth a tremendous amount. If they kill the power grid they lose access to any beach heads they likely established in the areas impacted by the power outage.
In my opinion an attack on the power grid will come only in a couple of circumstances...
- They are ready to invade physically and want to cripple us.
- They no longer deem us as having any assets they care whether they control but they want to cripple us and make us less of a threat.
If you lost power for a day, a week, a month, a season, a year, etc. How would that impact your life?
Do you know how to live without things provided by electricity? Does your house have a wood burning stove? How many water pumps providing water to your house will no longer be working? Do you have access to clean water that doesn't require electricity?
Do you live in what normally would be a desert environment and you rely on electricity for your air conditioning?
How about food storage? That refrigerator and those freezers are likely going to be gone.
If the power grid ever does go down for an extensive amount of time there will be a tremendous amount of death.
Now consider we no longer have factories that produce many of the components required by our power grid in the United States...
There are some states taking steps to reduce the huge potential disaster the power grid represents. It can also be taken out by a large solar flare and there are those that say such a flare is likely imminent.
It is certainly something to think about. Rather than giving into fear and doing nothing see it as an opportunity to plan how YOU would survive if it were to happen.
I don't think intelligent hackers would go for the power grid unless they are okay with removing access to all of the other assets they have compromised. Doing so would in my opinion indicate they see themselves at the end game in their plans, or they are just not thinking things through long term and they pull the trigger and have an "oops now, I can't get back in" moment.
Correct me if I’m wrong but it’s my understanding that some of the smaller types of transformers are still manufactured in the USA, but all of the big ones (used at major power plants) are now manufactured overseas.
That sounds about right. I've heard that if someone were to shoot certain transformers (which are visible and could be shot) it could take months to get the replacements shipped here assuming we are in good relations with some place that can provide them.
I do know some states have been taking steps to add redundancy so this is less of an issue but it is a very small number of states so far.
Correct.
And it would take 6 - 9 months to replace those, if China agreed.
80% of the USA population would most likely be dead in 1 year, without power to the infrastructure.
They definitely will try to cause disruption elsewhere before they take down the power grids. But, they have been testing those for at least a decade.
Sniper attacks on power stations
with zhou bai-den telling the oil line to pay their ransom at the same time he restricted Keystoke, we will see the same thing over and over again.
see Coughlin's catastrophic failure https://amzn.to/3wSieHD, or Bowman's when the eagle screams https://amzn.to/3vY3uqN
amazing to look at Bowman, published in 1994, and see what he predicted...and to look at the things that were never addressed.
Great info. Hadn't quite thought about it that way before, but make sense. Taking down the grid seems like the end. I think about off and on and should probably be doing more to prepare and stock up.
They can take down the grid as long as it is under control and geolocalise. The ultimate goal of this situation will always be to engineer control right in the midst of chaos. I hope it fails but we all know it is coming soon or later. Preparedness is the best way to survive this crisis.
Thanks for sharing.
Peace
Privacy is a really big problem these days, I hope more people understand this...
And about the electricity question...
I think a lot of people aren't prepared for a scenario where electricity goes out for an extended period of time...
It would be best if more people to started harvesting natural energy sources like solar, wind, and water.
Namaste!
Even solar, etc. for electricity are vulnerable if a solar flare hits of significant size. I've heard we are due for one. I've also heard the sun is entering a low activity period. Another one of those different stories depending upon whom you speak to.
To be truly prepared you'd want to do what you stated, but you would want the parts to repair damage to those things or replace them in some location secured from a flare so you could fix them in the event something like that happens. You'd also be prepared for other events like fire, tornado/weather, earthquake, etc. if you need to repair them.
True, that could happen, but you can never be prepared for every scenario.
Nope. Just prepare for what you can think of, can determine how to prepare for, and have the means to do so.
A lot of things we may be aware of but cannot plan for them. I could build a pretty amazing self sufficient piece of property prepared for pretty much anything that was thrown my way if I had the resources. :) Namely it'd be very expensive...
I agree with you ;)
Namaste!
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.Here in South Africa we are currently undergoing 5 hours of power cuts a day, so we don't even need hackers. Our government does it to themselves.
Yeah if we have it happen here it'd likely be due to equipment failure, or nut jobs with high powered rifles shooting out transformers. That hasn't happened. Yet at this point I don't think big state actors (China, Russia, etc) would take out the electricity unless it was at final stages of something because they have compromised so many computer systems in our country and if they shut off electricity they lose access to all of those compromised systems.
Here in South Africa we are currently undergoing 5 hours of power cuts a day, so we don't even need hackers. Our government does it to themselves.
Great article. SHEEPLE don't think like this but you're right take out the power grid, we lose our electricity (oh my!....as most including myself arent properly prepared for that.)
Without the power grid we're screwed!!