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CIA Says Hackers Have Cut Power Grid
Posted on Monday, January 21, 2008 @ 22:17:02 UTC by vlad
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Several cities outside the U.S. have sustained attacks on utility systems and extortion demands.
Robert McMillan, IDG News Service/ Saturday, January 19, 2008 6:00 AM PST
Criminals have been able to hack into computer systems via the Internet and cut power to several cities, a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency analyst said this week.
Speaking at a conference of security professionals on Wednesday, CIA analyst Tom Donahue disclosed the recently declassified attacks while offering few specifics on what actually went wrong.
Criminals have launched online attacks that disrupted power equipment in several regions outside of the U.S., he said, without identifying the countries affected. The goal of the attacks was extortion, he said...
Full story: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,141564-c,hackers/article.html
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Re: CIA Says Hackers Have Cut Power Grid (Score: 1)
by RBM on Thursday, January 24, 2008 @ 16:28:05 UTC
(User Info | Send a Message) | | http://www.nspe.org/PEmagazine/pe_1207_Software_License.html
Newer-model cars, nuclear reactors, air traffic control systems, and even roller coasters all have one important attribute in common. They operate with vital software systems that, if not engineered properly, can fail and result in terrible consequences. Yet, software engineering licensure is still heavily debated and exists in only one state—Texas |
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Re: CIA Says Hackers Have Cut Power Grid (Score: 1)
by malc on Tuesday, January 22, 2008 @ 00:23:10 UTC
(User Info | Send a Message) http://web.ukonline.co.uk/mripley | I read things like this and I come to two conclusions:
1. The CIA are scaremongering the ignorant so they can implement some subversive procedure under the guise of "protecting supply".
2. The IT staff in the power plants are dumb beyond belief.
A power plant will run quite happliy without any internet connection. They have done so for decades prior to the internet existing! So if a "hacker" is causing such severe problems then simply unplug the internet connection DAH DAH problem temporarily solved.
You then get hold of the idiots who designed a bad system and then kick the arse of all employees who have high level (power disrupting) privileges who have passwords like "password" or "guest". Then again if such passwords are allowed then its back to the software guys who are so stupid as to design a critical system that does not check for the bleedin obvious password.
Oh , and if microsoft software is used anywhere then fool you....... |
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Re: CIA Says Hackers Have Cut Power Grid (Score: 1)
by ElectroDynaCat on Tuesday, January 22, 2008 @ 11:57:07 UTC
(User Info | Send a Message) | Considering the state of decay of the US power grid at the present time, it won't take anything as sophiscated as a hacker to shut it down. Just wait around a while for the weather to get hot.
I expect major problems if the purported Global warming kicks in this summer, especially in the Southeast section of the country.
Buy a good generator, if possible get a solar/wind setup with a battery bank |
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DOE awards record amount of supercomputing power (Score: 1)
by vlad on Monday, January 21, 2008 @ 22:24:40 UTC
(User Info | Send a Message) http://www.zpenergy.com | K.C. Jones/ EE Times/ 01/17/2008 1:50 PM EST
The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science on Thursday said it will give 265 million processor hours through supercomputing awards.
The DOE noted it's the largest amount of supercomputing power awarded in its history and three times the amount awarded last year. The processing power cuts the time it takes to do research from years to weeks or months.
The computing power, donated through DOE's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (Incite) program, comes from various supercomputers at DOE labs and computing facilities throughout the country.
Fifty-five projects will receive processor hours, the DOE said. Thirty-one projects are new and 24 will continue previous work. Seventeen are conducted through universities, nine came from DOE labs, and the remainder came from other public, private, and international researchers.
Industry partners receiving the awards include Ansys; Boeing; Corning; Gene Network Sciences; General Atomics; General Motors; Pratt and Whitney; and Procter & Gamble.
Incite marks its fifth year by supporting research into protein folding and its role in health, climate predictions and climate change, energy, combustion chemistry simulations, and modeling supernova explosions and simulating black holes.
The DOE has expanded its supercomputing capacity, allowing scientists to receive more computing time. A project receiving 1 million processor hours on supercomputers could run on 1,000 processors for 1,000 hours, or about 41 days. Running a 1-million-hour project on a dual-processor desktop computer would take more than 57 years.
The next round of the Incite competition will be announced this summer, and DOE plans to quadruple the 2009 Incite awards to give away nearly 1 billion processor hours.
Source: http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=205900466 [www.eetimes.com]
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