EM Gear Blog linked to this story of an attack on our power grid from the Wall Street Journal...
The attack began just before 1 a.m. on April 16 last year, when someone slipped into an underground vault not far from a busy freeway and cut telephone cables.This has the hallmarks of a terrorist attack in my opinion.
Within half an hour, snipers opened fire on a nearby electrical substation. Shooting for 19 minutes, they surgically knocked out 17 giant transformers that funnel power to Silicon Valley. A minute before a police car arrived, the shooters disappeared into the night.
Whether foreign or some misguided domestic source this is serious.
If one of these "attackers" got smart and hit the right substation then things would get real interesting real fast.
Additionally there is no way to "make safe" our power grid from attack. Even electronic monitoring will only let you know whats under attack---it won't prevent it.
The US' achilles heel is identified and sooner or later they're gonna hit the sweet spot.
Yep. What is frightening is that after certain (quite low) point equipment like this isn't available off the shelf. You can't just drop by stores, pick one or two widgets up, and then go to fix it, no you have to wait while the manufacture builds one. There is a lot of talk of cyber attacks. But if the system is relatively new and runs say on Linux a good number of cyber attacks can be thwarted; not totally secure but this isn't the 90s when idiots hung anything off the net with little thought. What do you do if you computer acts? Switch it on and off. Sandbox a system using virtualization and all you need is a fresh instance. Break something real and something real has to take its place
ReplyDeleteHopefully this stuff happens in the blue states more often than in the red. I wonder which would turn into Doomsday/Mad Max faster in the event of widespread, organised attacks?
ReplyDeleteYEP! it would be Mad Max from hell in the blue states and they know it. it was damn near that after the hurricane hit in New York/New Jersey. they don't want to admit it but there was some bad stuff going on in those areas.
Deletewhat i'm worried about is if a prepper is involved in this. i know quite a few people that are almost praying for a societal collapse under the belief that is the only way the system will right itself.....i almost agree but i know the kind of carnage that will come with it.
if the FBI finds that a prepper or group was involved in this then its hunting season on us all.
Sol don't forget that preppers are specifically targeted in the data mining. So they already know who to target.
ReplyDeleteare they targeting the entire prepping community? if it is then they're fishing in a huge pond. LLDS, conservatives, other church groups and even the Red Cross all advocate a type of prepping in one form or another.
Deletethere has to be a smaller sample that they're going after or else they're practically hitting everyone living in the red states....and alot of those states are in hurricane ally so they must have a way of narrowing it down.
Tony, so what your saying is basically everyone that watches The Walking Dead is under surveillance.
DeleteI'm trying to remember the article, but the internet data mining was going after anyone that visited web sites for long term food storage and such.
DeleteWatching Fox the other day when they were talking about all the data mining the government was doing and they had a great point. Since they loosened up what they were looking for and pretty much collecting all data no one will ever be able to go through it all. So the feds are pissing everyone off to overload themselves to a point they will miss those they are actually looking for.
As far as the Walking Dead goes I need to order me some chain mail. If zombies are coming I don't want to get bit.
As for identifying power grid as a target, just go read some techno-thrillers from the 90's like the very good "The enemy within" from Larry Bond. In that book, with little preparation and rather few equipment, terrorists are able to shut down America by blowing the San Francisco bridge (highjack a truck full of an explosive substance), destroy a major inter-exchange by blowing another truck full of fuel, damage the electric power grid by destroying two electric-cable towers during a storm, doing it on both side of a river and then waiting for the repair crew to show up in order to kill them and force security forces to come alongside every future repair crew, thus slowing repair operations, doing a vicious attack with automatic weapons on a kindergarten school in a poor neighborhood to create racial tensions and then attack with a computer virus a large telephone network, shutting it down for a long time before engineers find out the cause. (this being, in the novel, a foreign attempt to divert the US' attention from events in the Persian Gulf).
ReplyDeleteJust this target list is enough to cause major fear !
thanks for the book recommendation.
DeleteThose anti material .50 caliber rifles can cause some bad holes in transformers which contain many fluids that are hazardous materials.
ReplyDeleteOnce long ago a Union strike caused a sniper to shoot at the transformers of the plant where I worked, using 30.06 AP they missed the transformer but put five shots into the steel beam above it spraying the anodizing area with fragments and cement spalls.
The transformer was right next to the paint shop and it's paint storage area and paint thinner tanks, an explosion would have been catastrophic.
The Union got booted but no one was ever caught for the crime.
Back in the late sixties a power substation was under threat and shot at by anti war peace folks they eventually had to place a security guard there to protect the place.
This tactic ain't new.