U.S electrical grid vulnerable to cyberattack

[reaper]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123914805204099085.html

Says the Russians and Chinese have maped the Americans electrical grid, and can fuck with it remotely.

Having been exposed to major electrical systems connected to data networks, I find it hard to believe.  I do not know anything about the electrical grid and it's connectivity.  All I know is the diverse electrical systems that have data connectivity are not things that are gonna be hacked, and by hacking one you don't hack them all (the systems i've seen).  And the systems would need something like an rsa key before you even get on the network to authenticate to the applications that interface with the electrical systems, which are highly monitored.

[jägermonsta]

im sure it's a bunch of shit

[reaper]

im sure it's a bunch of shit

I think so to, but I'm just guessing.  Where I work now we can control the power through the internet, but it's not like the net connectivity couldn't just be shut off.  This places isn't some electrical company or anything it's just a small business, where we have the capability to control the power remotely.  Previously to working here, I worked at GE, where they were doing some really interesting things with power.  But none of the things they are talking about in that article sound remotely feasible,  I would think the electrical grid companies wouldn't connect this shit to the public networks, and if so i'm sure they have plans for problems and tons of security.   Just seemed like hype as usually, but maybe I don't know what's up. why so much hype all the time?

 

[QwazyWabbit]

The point of the article I think is that the trend today is to throw PC's out there, either Windows or *nix to monitor or control processes and infrastructure all while being connected to the Internet without regard to proper security precautions. An office PC can be switched off or rebooted or wiped to "fix" problems for the usual office worker who only uses it for DB, Powerpoint and Word documents but they sure can't be taken offline as easily when they are running a real-time process. A simple firewall isn't sufficient. A penetration of these kinds of systems cannot be tolerated. The relatively insecure office systems can be a stepping stone into the critical control systems since there are often "trusted" users or applications that can access the control systems remotely. These are the vulnerable pathways.

The rest is FUD.

[reaper]

Like Die Hard 3 i'm sure a lot of the systems are closed, and dont have normal routes of connetivity.  Plus firewalls won't allow certain connectivity until an RSA key is entered, then the traffic is allowed to pass.  Two factor authentication is used creating an encrypted connection.  Part of the code is on a keychain, the key changes every 30 seconds, so you physically need the key.  The key generates a number that the firewall will know (from something like an ACE server), the number is created from an algorithm that uses the time seeded into the secureid keychain.  Since the server knows the seeded time , it knows what the good value is.

It's not like you can get an inside host tunneling back out, or go to the dmz and then to the inside, so from those networks you can get to the power control networks.  I would like to see what they did, for all I know some system was port scanned, and they write this up.  It is possible that systems are insecure, although they're diverse, and I doubt anything as important as the electrical grid is totally compromised, what's going on is probably negligable.