Wang Jianwei, a graduate engineering student in Liaoning, China, never imagined his paper on cyberattacks and the U.S. power grid would draw so much attention. However, concern about the paper is mounting due to the fact that it reportedly highlights a very real vulnerability of the U.S. power grid, the backbone of our nation’s civilian, commercial, and military infrastructure.
The report went largely unnoticed and unreported until Larry M. Wortzel, a military strategist and China specialist, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on March 10 that “Chinese researchers at the Institute of Systems Engineering of Dalian University of Technology published a paper on how to attack a small U.S. power grid sub-network in a way that would cause a cascading failure of the entire U.S.”
[…]
So is the U.S. at risk from a Chinese cyberassault on the power grid? That depends on who you ask. John Arquilla, director of the Information Operations Center at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. opines, “What we know from network science is that dense communications across many different links and many different kinds of links can have effects that are highly unpredictable. [Cyberwarfare is] analogous to the way people think about biological weapons — that once you set loose such a weapon it may be very hard to control where it goes.”
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I would like to reassure people in other countries that the United States of America is not similarly studying how to destroy your nation’s infrastructure with cyber attacks, and has no interest in pursuing such studies.
#1 for the win.
What kind of brainwashing bullshit political atmosphere are they running in China that this is the kind of thing that students are thinking about over there?
You’d think their country has enough problems of their own like censoring search engines and rivers on fire from massive pollution that they could be thinking about something more productive.
Well good for him. The US power companies should send him a nice check and a thank you card.
Then they should get off their duffs and correct the weaknesses he identified.
Look at it this way. They would have had to pay a consultant $2.5 million to tell them the exact same thing.
I don’t think it’s entirely brainwashing #2, I remember reading in an article one of their best selling books is about an eventually military conflict with the US (probably where they win handily).
Anyone who works with the grid can tell you how to knock it down.
Interesting article about the 2003 regional blackout caused by a tree. I wonder if the technology AEP used has been implemented more places since then.
#2 “What kind of brainwashing bullshit political atmosphere are they running in China that this is the kind of thing that students are thinking about over there?”
The same as in every developed country. You’ll probably find that students all over the world are doing the same thing. The whole “homeland security” industry has grown huge across the globe, and these are the kinds of studies that give you a job in that sector. Tbh, students would be stupid not to get in on it.
And it’s a really secret document.
He only published it in English a year ago, March, 2009.
We are so naive!
For someone living in the Chinese part of Asia and frequenting China year after year – from 1984 until last week – this news is nothing out of the ordinary. Just because Mao Tse Dung’s Cultural Revolutions seemingly is over and pappa-Deng’s white and black cats catches mice, NOTHING HAS CHANGED!
Listen up, there is a nationalistic sentiment in China that carries ‘lebensraum’, arrogance and supremacy you will not find anywhere else. And why? Because the educational system has not changed a bit. indoctrination and mono-cultural beliefs are prevalent.
Millionaires may be allowed and LV bags be fashionable, even Porches and Rolls Royse allowed in the streets, but the mindset has not changed. The Middle Kingdom and the century of China is discussed openly – everywhere.
No need to be a CIA analyst to observe that! Just ask the expats there all the time, are partly (as much as possible) are allowed inside the culture and partake in daily life. It is all clear.
The West and the US in particular is admired but also despised. And China as people and culture is concerned, is considered far supreme. In all of this, there is a primitive enemy identification thus hacking, cyber warfare etc. is a preparation.
We are so damned naive when it comes to it all. Check out the book ‘Poorly made in China’ (author escapes me here and now…) and you’ll get the sense of the situation though in micro perspective.
As long as we are useful (and stupid, and by God we are, all the time… this harmony may work. But once we are week and vulnerable… Well’ trillions in budget deficit and spending like a drunken sailor does not help the US much, not the rest of the West either… the squeeze will be on.
Believe me, this is still a war of ideologies. And the fall of the Soviet state was not the end of it… And the US is engaged in hopeless wars all over… Not winning, not accomplishing anything year after year and all weakness displayed to the world. Not something PRC regime will pay much respect to.
I’ll quit my rambling here, but – wake up America. Face reality! A change of center of gravity is underways…
Another reason why the US needs a decentralized, smart power grid that the republicans oppose.
The Obama administration is focusing on a smart grid where multiple (including clean) energy sources feed the grid and smart enough to reconfigure – like the internet.
Republican plan is to DIG for more dino juice in Saudi Arabia and feed the existing centralized, polluting plants in the US. They claim the benefit is all that extra money can be invested in new wars.
Some Chinese kid writes a report while the USA is engaging in two illegal, immoral, and fruitless wars. Which one upsets the teabagger’s more?
@10
Why the hell are we still in 2 wars and why did Obama decide to add troops to Afghanistan? I still scratch my head wondering who we have to elect to start withdrawing.
(Iraq = won; keep a base or 2 there and pull everything else out. Afghanistan = permanent police keeping … gtfo and let the United Nations run that craphole).
@6
“Tbh, students would be stupid not to get in on it.”
Yeah maybe …
@3
“They would have had to pay a consultant $2.5 million to tell them the exact same thing.”
True. That’s a silver lining.
The fact that we can read about it denotes a big change in China. Nothing like having somebody point out your security failings, instead of having them use them against you. People that are responsible for security need to guard against complacency and always presuppose vulnerability. I’m sure the adequate measures are being taken.
So he based his paper on the plot of Die Hard 4?
It’s almost a whole decade since the Patriot Act passed into law. Maybe somebody in Washington will get around to really having something done to make the country more secure, and I don’t mean stupidly searching for shampoo in airline passenger luggage or whatever else those drunken idiots are having done now.
@# 2 Hmeyers
Don’t worry all your best and brightest science students are also deeply studying the US power grid.
Unfortunately they are studying how to maximize the bond yield from selling distribution capacity and how to minimize the tax liability.
It is hilarious that some people would blame some kid in China for noticing flaws in our power grid that are so noticeable that they could be noticed by some kid in China.
Another related link about power storage as a failover option.
Better this post deal with the BS of hysterical headlines than to cut and paste one, itself.
Why blame computers and networks?
Why do you need a grad students paper?
Here is a simple process to take down a power grid
1. Non-union person walks into a power plant
2. Uses a wrench to tighten a hex nut on any random piece of equipment
3. Union walks out
4. Grid comes down
No required
Hey dodd…it’s the right-wing lunatics you need to fear…they’re already throwing bricks through windows.
What’s next? Assassinations? The DHS is already watching these idiots, you should too.
Dodd, so now you’re defending terrorists?
#24-Olo Baggins of Bywater
I’m for defending personal freedom from government interference.
It’s crystal clear that you don’t have a clue what you are defending.
dodd, so you’re one of them. Try this on and see how it fits:
ter·ror·ism
1. The use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes.
2. The state of fear and submission produced by terrorism or terrorization.
3. A terroristic method of governing or of resisting a government.
-dictionary.com, and many other places too.
Hate to spring it on you Dallas, but a highly distributed system can be even MORE inclined to unstable behavior than a centralized one as they are prone to hidden emergent behaviors. Indeed, most industrial and infrastructure was once safe because it was isolated and centralized – as well as very conservative in its design. But it’s just too easy to run everything off an XML link from a window somewhere on the interwebitubes. And here we are.
What is required is design for robustness in the case of failure – both random and malicious attack – and both network and real physical attack on the assets themselves.
This is expensive and very difficult. Something that tends to get overlooked in all but the most paranoid applications.
Best bet for the personally paranoid is to buy a dual fuel natural gas/LP generator with a big 750 gallon tank in the back. And don’t network its controls.
One of the key issues is that big power generators can’t spin up or down based on demand–with any speed at all. Yet, demand can fluctuate dramatically, leaving us with a conundrum. The original answer was the grid, letting excess power flow elsewhere and getting a boost from others’ excess during peaks. If the industry can develop useful large-scale power storage, then smaller centralized systems are more likely, and the fragile grid can be largely decommissioned.
WOW,
so someone exposes something Iv mentioned long ago.
The infrastructure of the USA is SERIAL format.
There is little Backup/parallelism/Support/redundancy/… to keep most of our systems WORKING.
Even the internet has little BACKUP to support a major Break. There are FEW interconnects to reroute a broken line.
Electrical power is an OLD string of xmas lights. If 1 line is broken, you can take out WHOLE strings. Finding the break and fixing it, is a PAIN, you would have people running around for MILES of power lines to Find it.
Even major Server farms have little or NO BACKUP. as shown when MSN went down for 4 days and lost TONS of data. You cant just SCRATCH a system and LOAD the daily backup and be BACK in 2hours..
Do you wonder why they keep the Location of FIBER optic lines OFF THE NET?? You could HIT 3 locations in the USA and and Cut all the lines.
Most of the problems with the Electrical supply in the USA, is the location. The corps/gov have setup a Single location power system, rather then a distributed system. It makes for a system thats easy to find and cause problems.
Even the Basic internet ISP, is at a disadvantage, WITHOUT competition. When you have only 1 source for service, if anything happens, you have no recourse.
#26-Olo Baggins of Bywater-terrorism-The use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes.
You mean the Union thugs paid for by the Democratic Party to show up at townhall meetings and tea parties with orders to intimidate and inflict violence on peaceful protesters.
Yeah, terrorism fits you pretty good.
This reminds me of the power blackouts we had in the late 90s in California due to one sub-station shutting down that caused an automatic shutdown of other on the network that caused nearly the whole west coast to go black.
The problem is this: There’s just barely enough power generation sources that powers a grid, so they share the load amongst other grids. So if one area of the grid needs power, it can be compensated from another area that isn’t using much, but can still output the needed power. So it balances out.
However, if one of those power sources drops out, for whatever reason, suddenly all the remaining power plants can get overloaded since the load is still present.
Automatic systems detects when the load is about to go too high, and shuts off so it won’t damage it self. Again this causes yet MORE load on the remaining power plants, and you start a domino effect of them shutting down since you’re losing more power sources, yet the load is still high.
It’s better for the power plants/stations to shut down for a few hours, rather than damage them which could keep them offline for months. Worse it could just go kablewy!!
Obviously this is a bad system, and the best way to avoid this sorta thing is to set up your own power sources. Be it solar, windmill, or a big fuel-cell in your garage (where your car would be) and you can usually GET A CHECK (instead of a bill) from your local power company as you feed your excess power into the grid.
#1
The united states “government” may not be, but people living here in the USA (or for any country for that matter) may be thinking about this sorta thing.
Ever since 9/11 we realized that potential enemies are no longer sovereign nations, that have borders with other countries we can ally with and play global chess. Terrorists (or any group that doesn’t like western culture) can be all over the world, peppered around the planet just waiting.
It’s time we stop relying on large government, large corporations, and large service companies.
If you want to protect your home and family, get a gun. If you want to earn a living with out the fear of losing your job from downsizing, and bankruptcy, start your own business. Don’t want to lose power because PG&E fucked up, get your own fuel-cell.
A different perspective.
For the TLDRs out there, a quote: “And independent American scientists who read his paper said it was true: Mr. Wang’s work was a conventional technical exercise that in no way could be used to take down a power grid.”