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Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials.The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven't sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.
What people also don't get is that even if these facilities networks are properly sanitized, all the foreign software removed, they are still vulnerable to botnet attacks that can overload the networks and interrupt critical communications between various components and sites that can still cause outages.
Additionally, how do you know that it's the Chinese and Russians and not 3rd parties using Chinese or Russian proxies or perhaps even compromised machines in those locations?
The answers may be simpler than I'm making it sound or it may be way more complex than you can imagine so I wouldn't jump to conclusions too fast about the who or why until the research is complete.
They probably left an extra DHCP packet headers receipt or RJ45 Duck Sauce from remote "China Wok" Server. all over keyboards.. ;)
No Pun Intended. I'd love me some Chinese Food now!
[news.bbc.co.uk...]
"The vulnerability is something [we] have known about for years," said US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.
If that's true, heads should roll, however, maybe it's a bluff or BS.
I know nothing of how power-grid control systems work, but I would assume that the grid is divided into cells - in this case, cleansing the system cell by cell should not be the biggest job in the world, after all, they should have all the source code.
Kaled.
