On Sat, 13 Sep 2003, will hill wrote: > I also suspect the "state estimator" was running on windoze. We had > such estimating equipment for core monitoring at River Bend. The plant > could be run without it, but it was helpful. The program's writers > actually put in a splash screen saying that it was for "Windoze". I can > imagine that the "state estimator" was a similar work running on a > little box in the control room. > > I'll bet anyone a nickel that the only thing the monitor system and > state estimator have in common was Microsoft under it.
I'd sure love to blame Microsoft for this also, but there are many other factors to consider. How bout blame the virus writer? Midwest ISO dropped the ball on several occasions. How bout blame Midwest ISO's IT guys for not patching their systems. Especially the *important* ones. If the state estimator is so important, how come there wasn't a backup system? Or ten backup systems? Why was windows file sharing turned on? How bout blame the operator that checked their hotmail account from the state estimator machine(this wouldn't surprise me...)? Apparently these guys didn't have much of a disaster recovery plan. They had no contigencies in place should their monitoring equipment start failing. They did exactly what you're NOT supposed to do in a disaster: they freaked out and peed their pants. This is really frightening, since the power grid has been a suspected terrorist target for the past 2 years. I'd like to blame the people responsible for those computers for not keeping them patched, and not ensuring there is at least some fault tolerance in the system, regardless of the OS. The scary thing is the electrical engineers that set up the systems probably don't know jack about computers, networks or security. And that is sad. I'll be first to admit that, yes, my XP laptop got infected cause i didn't bother to patch it. My laptop doesn't monitor the Northeast power grid though. (it would be really cool if it did...) ray
