In my experience in the third world, a leading cause of outages is an employee
in the control center hitting the 'off' switch. Despite the equivalent of the
Big Red Button with a sign above it saying "Don't touch", they touch it. Of
course, when they do that, they say "I don't now what happened, it just turned
itself off".
A large number of airplane crashes on blamed on computer bugs. It's often the
first reason they come up with when they can't explain what happened otherwise.
For example, the Air France crash over the Atlantic last year was first assumed
to be a computer error. But, later investigations have failed to find ANY
crashes that are due to computer bugs.
Today we experience "hackers in the gap". Whenever there is a gap, something
you can't explain, then the first assumption is that it must have been a hacker
who did it. In truth, some of those cases might be right, but the overall, it's
a fallacy.
________________________________
From: Dave Aitel <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 10:08 AM
Subject: [Dailydave] kinetics
So yesterday, Chile was without power for a bit. Technically it's their third
blackout in three days. Why? Who knows? Perhaps it's unknowable in some
mathematical or philosophical sense. Or perhaps as the WashPost says: " The
reasons remain unclear, but failures in the transmission grid are suspected."
These aren't "modern" grids apparently, so no doubt instead of
running Windows XP they are running Windows NT 4 + a very old
version of Hydrogen[1].
Likewisetwo trains crashed in Shanghai - they'd switched to manual equipment
since the high tech signaling equipment "stopped working".
You know what's complete balderdash? When people say "The US is
much more heavily invested in high tech networking processes, and
hence, more vulnerable to a cyber attack than everyone else."
People say this sort of thing all the time. Not sure why.
And, in completely unrelated news, WhitePhosphorus released two SCADA exploits
in their CANVAS Exploit Pack update today. They have 114 exploits right now,
and "if you don't have it, you don't have it", as they say. :>
-dave
[1] I jest, of course. Modern Hydrogen works fine on NT4! ;>
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