Ted Koppel's "Lights Out" book

Ted koppel has written a book about a cyber attack on the nations electrical grid. I got an advanced reader's copy, and it is really eye opening. I'll share some of the major points, and here is a link to a recent tv appearance:

http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/lights-out-ted-koppel-on-electric-grid-cyber-threats/

There is an assumption that the city, state, or federal government has a contigency plan for the grid going down. Sorry folks, you are on your own.

There are three grids that generate and distribute power throughout the country. Interrupting any one of those would cause millions to be in the dark.

The US, with the help of Israel, was the first nation to use a cyber attack as a weapon of policy..against Iran's nuclear centrifuges. They appeared to be operating normally to the techs watching them, but they were literally tearing themselves apart. The same would happen with an attack on the grid. Everything would look normal until it was way to late.

The federal agencies equipped to monitor the grid for cyber attack can't because privacy laws prohibit them from doing so.

Adhering to power industry standards is entirely voluntary.

Banks spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on security, but still get hacked.

Studies show that it took an average of almost 300 days before companies that had been breached ever learned about it.

Large power transformers are huge, expensive, custom built, and, for the most part, not inter-changeable. Most are built overseas, and take at least 6 months to build. Only the very largest companies have spares.

It's estimated that it would cost $2 billion to start to secure the existing grid. Conservative estimates put the cost of the Afghan and Iraq wars at over $1 trillion.

The mormons are perhaps the best prepared of all groups to ride out a major power grid failure.

That is a quick synopsis of the first half of the book.

If this is something that is high on your list of possible scenarios to plan for, this is a must read. Hopefully this will start a national discusion.

Please, without getting political, share your thoughts after you read the book.

At least ETS'ers will have their paracord properly flaked, ready for instant deployment....

Makes you think that a distributed grid system, with a lot of relatively independent solar panels on rooftops, would make a lot of sense....

I've got rooftop solar hooked to the grid. If the grid goes down, the inverter disconnects the panels. It's a safety measure to prevent electrocuting anybody working on the wires.

The actual amount of power returned to the grid is bupkis. The panels offset what the house uses on an annual basis, but there's not much leftover.

EDIT: I don't actually own the panels. I got them as part of a PPA. To be able to legally run the house directly off the panels, I would be looking at ~$40k to buy the system from the utility.

Most rooftop solar systems are tied in to the grid. No grid = no power. Having it independant or switchable from grid tied to independant, means a lot more cash to be invested in the solar systems.

I research the effects of a large scale power failure for a large exercise and found that in my country:
- Regular consumers; fend for yourself.
- Fire and rescue, will get you out of the elevator.
- Sensitive organisations/buildings (hospitals, other care facilities, the water company) are equipped with emergency power generators.
- Emergency planning is for failure of backup power generation at sensitive organisations/buildings.
- Water pressure will remain on for a long time, since the water company have a independant emergency power generator and fuel. However delivered at 2 bar on ground level, so bad luck if you life up high.
- Our grid is redundant at the 150KV level. lower voltage lines are not redundant, but due to they way they are tied to each other, they can switch power from other connections from the 150KV grid and effectively reduce the size of the power outage.
- There are build in safetys in the grid to absorb power spikes.
- We have black start facility's used to restart regular power stations (pretty impressive gasturbine generator)

Fun part: crisis command centre was just equipped with new computers and big flat screens. Guys pressing al the power buttons at the start of exercise, power goes down... "Is this part of the training?", uhmm... No... Fuses blew. Electrician made a mistake with the new stuff. Atleast we found it during an exercise...

Yup! Add a pencil sharpener and a couple of bags of coal and we don't need no stinkin' grid!

I'm very far from an expert on this subject, but I recall some conversations indicating that there are some fairly simple things that utilities can do to substantially harden their systems against things like cyber attacks and EMP. But apparently there are costs involved and no regulatory requirements or other incentives for taking such measures.

There's another novel out that discusses our cyber vulnerabilities with respect to our national defense. It has attracted considerable notice in navalist and strategic planning circles. It's called "Ghost Fleet" by P. W. Singer. http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Fleet-Novel-Next-World/dp/0544142845

We have recently upgraded our diesel fuel tank for the apartment complex generator (tripled the size). So at least we should not be stuck in elevators, and our public space lights, water pumps, and entrance/exit gates will be functional for quite a while. Also we have huge cellars under each building with per unit cages, it's quite cold there, so we can store some perishable food for the recovery period.

For the electrical grid cybersecurity, it is quite possible that the author simply has no good enough grasp of the network security measures and secured network architectures available and implemented. Banks and online shops are no good as an indicator at all, as they have to be wide open to the public and other businesses to work properly. Just use an Intranet without any physical Internet connections and you are safe as long as you don't have a sabotaging spy among your employees. But that worked perfectly during millennias of pre-cyber era.

Nope! D.Ritter PSP will save you from any disaster!

On a related note (grid shutting down), from today's Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capi...eather-threats/


"In 2012, NASA said the sun unleashed two massive clouds of plasma that barely missed a catastrophic encounter with Earth. “If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,” physicist Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado told NASA two years after it happened."


National Space Weather Action Plan -- released today.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default...an_20151028.pdf



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The internet was designed to be completely open. To try to put the genie back in the bottle is impossible.

Russia has confirmed that Iraq was successful in recruiting some top engineers to deal specifically with EMP and power grid security.

If anyone has their home wired to be accessable wirelessly..that is be able to turn the lights off/on, control their thermostat, etc..that is another vulnerability. A disatisfied employee could cause complete havoc if that is the wish.

The intrusion into Sony may be seen as an escalation in cyber terror.

Iran hacked into a Saudi company, Aramco, in 2012 effectively rendering their 30,000 computers useless. Per the NSA it was their answer to Stuxnet.

Anyone with a flash drive and a usb port...well, you get the idea.

I suppose the vulnerability of the electrical grid varies a lot from country to country (and even at the local level), but I suspect that most vital systems are inherently more robust and less prone to cyber terrorism or sabotage than is sometimes assumed. Similar concerns were raised during the Y2K scare, which turned out to be completely blown out of proportion. Maybe I'm just wary of doomsayers competing for media attention because more often than not, this kind of publicity doesn't do much good at all.

So Iraq supposedly invested in some top engineers. Not sure that was a lot of help once they had US tanks in the streets of Baghdad. Much has been said about the North Koreans hacking into Sony, but I can't really see how that would rate as a major threat to national security. Unpleasant, no doubt. But I suspect that right now at least there are real limits to what can be achieved with cyber attacks alone.

I would be more concerned about the financial sector perhaps. With so much of the economy based on completely abstract numbers and money that only really exists in banking computer systems I'm thinking that would be the easiest target and one more likely to destabilize an entire country.

Yeah, well, you'd still need to go pick some hot dogs off the wiener tree to roast over the coal fire to make it proper, LOL.

Unfortunate he couldn't have come up with a different name for the book. This one's already been used for another interesting story. Oh well.

Going after the US finanacial sector would also result in massive collateral damage to the rest of the world. We're second after the EU in terms of GDP and imports and third in exports behind the EU and China. It's a tempting target for somebody with idealism problems with western culture.

i don't think the grid is in danger and i say that because the US does not put all it's cards on the table when it comes to what we have in place to prevent that.

There is now a lot of talk about getting rid of cash money. That should multiple the effects when the electrons stop drifting along a a few centimeters per second..

FYI, grid attacks / grid down is in the news again. It's a bit of a scare article, but maybe it'll help infrastructure security and maintenance upkeep.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/grid-attack-how-america-could-go-dark/ar-BBuiD8p

I feel that the grid in any developed country is INHERENTLY and UNAVOIDABLY vulnerable.
TPTB may well have better defences against a cyber attack than we know about, but not against a simple physical attack.

Simple observation shows how vulnerable large grid substations are, they are too numerous to effectively guard. The equipment is almost always out in the open to facilitate cooling.
Enclosing the equipment in buildings is not only hugely costly, but adds its own risks including increased fire risk, and storm or earthquake damage to the building.
Anything out in the open is vulnerable to attack with weapons such as hand grenades, high powered rifles and small rockets or missiles of various types, or improvised bombs chucked over the fence. Terrorists have ready access to such items.
Most substations are not manned or guarded and a single armed guard would be ineffective against a group of terrorists.
No amount of armed guarding of the perimeter protects against high powered rifle fire or an anti-tank rocket fired from a rooftop a few hundred feet away.

An attack on a single substation would not be THAT serious, fires, blow ups and storm damage have after all occurred previously without any widespread serious consequences.

An attack on a significant number of substations and on long distance transmission lines could be very serious indeed.

IMHO, the government should subsidise the manufacture of spare transformers, switchgear, high voltage cable, and related equipment in order to facilitate prompt replacement of damaged equipment.
This spare stock could be stored in a military base or other secure facility.

Apart from that, not much can be done IMHO, resources should be concentrated on equipping all important buildings with backup generators, or proven design and regularly tested, together with ample fuel.
The government should also keep a supply of large and medium sized transportable generators, and a very large reserve of diesel fuel for emergency use. Also stored on a military base to protect against theft.

Grid attack vulnerabilities have been in the news for years so I am not sure why the big jump in interest lately but still makes for interesting reading.

You should read "One Second After" by William R. Forstchen. This is a very good read about the aftermath of our electrical grid going down. It's a story about people surviving, not a technical discussion of things.

There is a sequel titled "One Year After" that came out recently. Well, the paperback version was released "recently", the hardback has been out a little longer. I picked that one up on the day it was released in paperback, but I haven't started reading it yet.

https://www.amazon.com/Second-After-John-Matherson-Novel-ebook/dp/B002LATV16/ref=pd_sim_351_1?ie=UTF8&dpID=51QWrQ01RDL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_OU01__BG0%2C0%2C0%2C0_FMpng_AC_UL160_SR105%2C160_&psc=1&refRID=R5045ABV4HVPEH2NYT5Z

https://www.amazon.com/One-Year-After-Matherson-Novel-ebook/dp/B00TXAE6Z8/ref=pd_sim_351_1?ie=UTF8&dpID=51gUGYJLwRL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_OU01__BG0%2C0%2C0%2C0_FMpng_AC_UL160_SR106%2C160_&psc=1&refRID=VG383ZRXPG2XHKJX16BP

Another book about "after the EMP" is "Ride The Wilderness" by Michael Juge. I picked this one up as an eBook because it is only $1.99. This is the first book in a series. It's not bad, but not great either. In all honesty, I have not continued to read other books in the series. But for only $1.99, the book is entertaining enough.