Are Chinese Hackers Smarter than a Tree Limb?

Large portions of the US power grid were taken down by storm-downed trees and tree limbs recently. Thanks to prompt action by electrical workers from over a dozen states, power was restored to almost all customers within a matter of days. But the North American power grid is vulnerable to a growing threat far more dangerous than falling tree limbs. Read on:

The vulnerability of the energy industry's new wireless smart grid will inevitably lead to lights out for everyone, according to leading cyber expert David Chalk. In an online interview for an upcoming documentary film entitled 'Take Back Your Power' (www.ThePowerFilm.org), Chalk says the entire power grid will be at risk to being taken down by cyber attack, and if installations continue it's only a matter of time.

“This could actually be worse than a nuclear war, because it would happen everywhere. How governments and utilities are blindly merging the power grid with the Internet, and effectively without any protection, is insanity at its finest.” “We're in a state of crisis,” said Chalk. “The front door is open and there is no lock to be had. There is not a power meter or device on the grid that is protected from hacking - if not already infected - with some sort of trojan horse that can cause the grid to be shut down or completely annihilated.” _BusinessWire

Speaking at DesignWEST panel on hacking the smart grid, senior research engineer Joe Loomis blasted through the buzz on smart grid and smarter energy technology, exposing the risks of hacking and full scale cyber warfare and the crippling effects it could have on national infrastructure.

“It’s critical infrastructure and society depends on it, making it a prime target for attack,” said Loomis.

Indeed, as smart grid technology develops year by year, so too do the opportunities for hackers with malicious intentions on national infrastructure. _EETimes

The FBI warns that insiders and individuals with only a moderate level of computer knowledge are likely able to compromise meters with low-cost tools and software readily available on the Internet. _Hacking the smart grid

Tools to help utilities monitor the extent of malicious penetration into their systems are just now becoming more available. But we know that in the ongoing war between hackers and security officials, the hackers are typically at least one step ahead.

The new "smart grid" would also be a sitting duck for EMP attacks.

The power grids of the US and Canada are interconnected, and thus share a large co-vulnerability. Large numbers of malicious hackers operate in Russia, China, and other nations which are typically antagonistic toward more open opportunity societies. By pushing "smart grids," the US and Canadian governments appear to be forcing utilities and other critical infrastructure to open their doors to hackers and malicious cyber-attacks.

It is likely to take months or longer to restore the power grid after a large scale cyber- or EMP attack on very vulnerable "smart grids."

The body count after such a widespread power outage could be well into the millions.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The Second Coming, WB Yeats

Understanding what holds things together, and how they fall apart, is one of the most important tasks for members of the Society for Creative Apocalyptology.

There is only so much that small groups of people -- no matter how dedicated -- can do for very large societies that seem determined to commit suicide. But such groups can take steps to see that they have certain advantages when emerging on the other side.

Living in a Fool's Paradise: Spritely Foundations of the Modern World

A security researcher was able to locate and map more than 10,000 industrial control systems hooked up to the public internet, including water and sewage plants, and found that many could be open to easy hack attacks, due to lax security practices.

...Leverett used the SHODAN search engine developed by John Matherly, which allows users to find internet-connected devices using simple search terms. He then matched that data to information from vulnerability databases to find known security holes and exploits that could be used to hijack the systems or crash them. He used Timemap to chart the information on Google maps, along with red markers noting brand devices that are known to have security holes in them. He described his methodology in a paper (.pdf) about the project.

Leverett found 10,358 devices connected through a search of two years worth of data in the SHODAN database _Wired

Of course, in China and Russia, teams of hackers are paid well to find ways of exploiting security weaknesses in government and industrial infrastructure. The US NSA is on that like buzzing insects on excreta.

Your life depends upon the smooth working of industrial, commercial, governmental, and municipal infrastructure. If something mucks that up, you will suffer the consequences.

Leverett’s tool shows how easy it is for a dedicated attacker or just a recreational hacker to find vulnerable targets online to sabotage.

...“Vendors say they don’t need to do security testing because the systems are never connected to the internet; it’s a very dangerous claim,” Leverett said last week at the S4 conference, which focuses on the security of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems (SCADA) that are used for everything from controlling critical functions at power plants and water treatment facilities to operating the assembly lines at food processing and automobile assembly plants.

“Vendors expect systems to be on segregated networks — they comfort themselves with this. They say in their documentation to not put it on an open network. On the other side, asset owners swear that they are not connected,” Leverett said. But how do they know? _Wired

Here is more about the network threat to vital utilities.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. It is likely that you do not really want to know about the many vulnerabilities that underlie your existence. Perhaps it is best to trust the media, trust your professors, trust the things people tell you. What possible good could come from trying to look too deeply into such things as the nuts and bolts which make modern high tech civilisations possible?

And they tell us that the world can run on big wind castles in the sky and high-rise buildings covered with solar glass and solar paint. All we need in order for it all to work -- to turn the innate unreliability and intermittency of wind and solar into a rock solid foundation for civilisation -- is "the smart grid" and its ultraconnectivity. What could go wrong?

Shodan search engine

The Coming Human Die-Off: A Little Goes a Long Way

The idea of a coming great human die-off is gaining popularity among those of the lefty-Luddite green enviro persuasion. Whether the die-off will be triggered by resource scarcity, by a voluntary reduction of human fertility, or by more aggressive means, such a great die-off is being seen as a positive event by the trendy and green forces which have taken over most media outlets, Green NGOs, funding agencies, and large segments of academic institutions.

The great human die-off is being backed by some famous names:

“A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
- Ted Turner, CNN founder and UN supporter

“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill … All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.” - Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution, pg.75

“We must speak more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren’t enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.” - Mikhail Gorbachev

"I believe that human overpopulation is the fundamental problem on Earth Today” and, “We humans have become a disease, the Humanpox.” - Dave Foreman, Sierra Club and co founder of Earth First!

“If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.” - Prince Phillip, Queen Elizabeth’s husband, Duke of Edinburgh, leader of the World Wildlife Fund

Advanced societies are considered "soft targets," because their populations have become so accustomed to things running relatively smoothly. Just a bit of disruption can go a long way toward upsetting such societies.

It is becoming easier for individuals and small groups to trigger events which can lead to momentous calamity in the advanced world. Increased networking of vital infrastructure is making it easier for hackers to commit cyber-terrorism:

Cyber Terrorism

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Government pressure to create "smart power grids" to replace traditional grids, provides malicious hackers with a wide range of new targets to attack, at various scales.

The threat of an EMP attack -- capable of taking out continental scale power grids -- is likewise increased, as nuclear proliferation proceeds across the Pakistan-Iran-N.Korea axis (aided by China and Russia). As many as 90% of an advanced society can be expected to die within 1 year as a result of a large-scale EMP attack.

Chemical terrorism is another way in which advanced cultures could be targeted specifically. Coordinated chemical attacks using various vectors could decapitate leadership and expertise in several vital areas, leading to widespread paralysis of normal infrastructure. Such a paralysing strike might well be a set-up for a more devastating followup attack.

Increasing sophistication of inexpensive tools for "bio-hacking" are also making it more likely that individuals or small groups will create novel microbial agents of mass contagion.

Security futurist Marc Goodman says that synthetic biology will lead to new forms of bioterrorism — opportunities for the bad guys to create never-before-seen forms of bio-toxins. These bio-threats might be nearly impossible to detect because they can be customized to the genome of a certain person or groups of people. Goodman, who has long worked on cyber crime and terrorism with organizations such as Interpol and the United Nations, believes the potential bio-threat is greatly underestimated. “Bio-crime today is akin to computer crime in the early 1980s,” said Goodman at the Singularity University executive program this week. “Few initially recognized the problem, but one need only observe how the threat grew exponentially over time.” _WaPo

It is not necessary to target the third world, in order to achieve a high magnitude die-off such as is depicted in the chart above. The third world has become so dependent upon the technological infrastructures and products provided by more advanced societies, that if the advanced world goes, most of the third world will quickly follow.

The resulting world of much lower human population, will also be much less technologically capable than the world at present, in a quantitative sense. In a qualitative sense, however, most of human technology will be saved in digital and book form. This means that within 1 to 2 centuries after the great die-off, the higher intelligence populations of the presently advanced world would grow to a large enough size to begin implementing modern technologies on a global scale once again.

In other words, if lefty-Luddite greens are engineering the great human die-off to permanently eliminate high tech civilisations and infrastructures, their efforts will ultimately fail.

But that will be cold comfort for your children and grandchildren who will have to suffer through the bloody mess aftermath left to them by the possibly well-intentioned greens.

It is up to you to make sure that they survive that bloody mess. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

Some of the above is cross-published from abu al-fin

More: The conspiracy zone...

SOME of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population....The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.

Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America’s wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey.

...They gathered at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist and president of the private Rockefeller University, in Manhattan on May 5. The informal afternoon session was so discreet that some of the billionaires’ aides were told they were at “security briefings”.

Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, said the summit was unprecedented. “We only learnt about it afterwards, by accident. Normally these people are happy to talk good causes, but this is different – maybe because they don’t want to be seen as a global cabal,” he said. _Prison Planet

These are some of the people with the ability to sway media outlets -- which they largely own -- along with NGOs, academic research and pronouncements via funding, and a significant number of elected officials, via campaign support, job offers, board directorships, and the funneling of significant investments.

It is not surprising that the super-wealthy would be concerned about population overgrowth, if they truly believed that it would bring about the end of the world. But it is a bit troubling when they deliberately take a cause such as "the great carbon hysteria orthodoxy and climate change crusade," wrap it into a trans-global agenda, and push it into the heart of each new generation's training and education -- from K-12 through university and beyond.

Does this mean that these people are intentionally contaminating third world immunisation efforts, so as to help bring about the great human die-off -- using the UN and NGOs as intermediaries? Probably not. I am acquainted with a lot of the people involved in such international programs, and do not believe for one second that they would be a part of such a travesty.

But now that we know that the richest of the rich have taken an interest in limiting -- and even slashing -- the human population of the planet, we may want to watch what they do more carefully, through their almost countless intermediaries.

Is This the Super-Spy We've Been Waiting For?

While this diminutive computer-in-a-thumb-drive bears no resemblance to Daniel Craig, Pierce Brosnan, much less Sean Connery, it is capable of snooping and extracting information with the best of them.

Image Source
Norwegian company FXI Technologies showed off an amazing USB stick-sized portable computer prototype on Friday, Nov. 18. Code-named Cotton Candy because its 21 gram weight is the same as a bag of the confection, the tiny PC enables what its inventor calls "any-screen computing": the ability to turn any TV, laptop, phone, tablet, or set-top box into a dumb terminal for its Android-powered operating system.
Packed in its tiny body is a dual-core 1.2-GHz Samsung Exynos ARM CPU (the same processor as in the Galaxy S II), 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, HDMI-out and even a microSD card slot for memory.

...When you plug the Cotton Candy into a Mac or PC, the Windows or OS X operating system recognizes it as a USB drive. You can then launch the software and run the Cotton Candy's Android environment in a secure window while you use your desktop OS outside the window. You can even transfer files between your notebook's native OS and the Cotton Candy's Android environment by dragging them off or on the USB stick's memory.

...Because the Cotton Candy is a full-fledged computer, it should be able to plug into a USB hub and connect directly to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse to launch its OS. Offices or schools could set up docking terminals to support users who carry it in their pockets.
Cotton Candy's purpose is to provide a computing experience that users can carry with them and replicate anywhere they go. Imagine walking into an Internet cafe or a business center, popping your Cotton Candy into a USB port, and having your own operating system and applications take over the device. _FoxNews

Indeed. Or imagine walking into a rival corporation's headquarters, and covertly plugging a pre-programmed spy thumb computer into the rival network. Within seconds it could be relaying sensitive information wirelessly, while covertly taking over the network and all its resources.

Something similar may have happened with the Stuxnet worm in Iran, but using a simple USB drive. Imagine how much more you could do with a powerful computer that just resembles a USB drive?

In reality, this is just a waystation along the road to nano-sized spy computers capable of invisibly flying through the doors and windows of buildings, or hitching a ride on the soles of shoes just about anywhere. Entire swarms of such nanocomputers could meet at a pre-arranged time and place, taking over in a very short time whatever network-controlled resources they were targeting.

Do you want to shut down a city's water supply? What about its electricity grid, or its cell phone networks? Consider disrupting the traffic light network, or sending a barrage of false fire and security alarms to police and fire departments, as a diversion from what you actually have planned?

You see there is no need to bomb a country that depends upon a "smart grid" or embedded networks. Just take over the networks that control the grid, the water supply, communications, and government agencies. If you do it anonymously enough, your adversary or target will be vulnerable to your next move, without even understanding who was behind the disruption.

The only defense against this type of inevitable attack, is redundant systems. Look around you, to see what organisations are developing redundant systems to deal with this type of certain attack. Even more importantly: What redundant systems have you developed for yourself and your company or household?

Update: Russian hackers destroy part of the water system of Springfield, Illinois using remote hacking techniques. The onslaught has just begun.

New Update 1 Dec 2011: It appears that the Springfield, Illinois water pump burnout was caused by normal wear and tear. The "false alarm" claim of Russian hacking was caused by a routine monitoring call from Russia the owner of the American company that provides advanced networking for the Springfield plant. The owner happened to be on vacation in Russia when he received a call that there may be a problem with the plant. He made a routine remote log-in to the network using his credentials, from his Russian location. A few months later, a pump burned out. Now you know the rest of the story.

Night Dragon Hack-Attacks Connected to Industrial Accidents?

We hear about industrial accidents and explosions all the time. Here is a recent example from Turkey:

At least seven people were killed and 34 injured Thursday in an apparent accidental explosion at a factory in Turkey's capital Ankara, media reports said.

The death toll was likely to rise because several people were still believed to be buried under the rubble left by the explosion....The powerful explosion is believed to have been caused by a worker's mishandling of oxygen tanks at the factory, which employed at least 80 people in manufacturing hydraulic machinery. _MAC

But such accidents begin to take on new possible meanings as knowledge about the Chinese "Night Dragon" intrusions and the Stuxnet worm become more widely known. The Stuxnet worm took control of target machines in Iranian uranium enrichment facilities, causing them to behave erratically and destroy themselves. The Chinese Night Dragon attacks and intrusions are likewise capable of taking control of target machines:

...a [Chinese] company that, according to the company’s advertisements, provides “Hosted Servers in the U.S. with no records kept” for as little as 68 RMB (US$10) per year for 100 MB of space. The company’s U.S.-based leased servers have been used to host the zwShell C&C application that controlled machines across the victim companies.

...McAfee has determined that all of the identified data exfiltration activity occurred from Beijing-based IP addresses and operated inside the victim companies weekdays from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Beijing time, which also suggests that the involved individuals were “company men” working on a regular job, rather than freelance or unprofessional hackers. In addition, the attackers employed hacking tools of Chinese origin and that are prevalent on Chinese underground hacking forums. These included Hookmsgina and WinlogonHack, tools that intercept Windows logon requests and hijack usernames and passwords. _Forbes

The targets of Night Dragon included oil & gas companies which operate refineries -- refineries that are subject to exploding if their controls malfunction. The same is true for many chemical plants, and other types of industrial plants. Machinery at most modern factories is networked, to allow for highly automated operation. Anyone who can hack into the network and take control of the machines can also take control of the destiny of that plant.

Industrial work is already extremely hazardous, as jobs go. But in the highly-networked age, where sensitive machinery is controlled remotely via the net, there is one more hazard to worry about.

As Obama and his allies press for a highly networked "smart grid" which is meant to grow more reliant on inherently unreliable wind power, the hazards for society at large only grow larger.

The Unutterable Stupidity of Obama's "Smart Grid"

President Barack Obama’s talk about the need for a “smart grid” sounds, well, smart...As currently envisaged, however, it’s a dangerously dumb idea. _SciAm

SciAm

President Obama tends to be attracted to ideas that sound good on the surface, but which are incredibly stupid and destructive at their core. The so-called "smart grid" is yet one more in a long line of such stupid and destructive ideas coming from the Obama White House.

The problem is cybersecurity. Achieving greater efficiency and control requires hooking almost every aspect of the electricity grid up to the Internet—from the smart meter that will go into each home to the power transmission lines themselves. Connecting what are now isolated systems to the Internet will make it possible to gain access to remote sites through the use of modems, wireless networks, and both private and public networks. And yet little is being done to make it all secure.

The grid is already more open to cyberattacks than it was just a few years ago. The federal government has catalogued tens of thousands of reported vulnerabilities in the 200,000-plus miles of high-voltage transmission lines, thousands of generation plants and millions of digital controls. Utilities and private power firms have failed to install patches in security software against malware threats. Information about vendors, user names and passwords has gone unsecured. Logon information is sometimes unencrypted. Some crucial systems allow unlimited entry attempts from outside.

As the power industry continues to invest in information technology, these vulnerabilities will only get worse. Smart meters with designated public IP addresses may be susceptible to denial of service attacks, in which the devices are overwhelmed with spurious requests—the same kind of attacks now made on Web sites. Such an attack could result in loss of communication between the utility and meters—and the subsequent denial of power to your home or business.

The smart grid would also provide hackers with a potential source of private information to steal. Just as they use phishing attacks to elicit passwords, credit-card numbers and other data stored on home computers, hackers could find ways of intercepting customer data from smart meters. A sophisticated burglar might use these data to figure out when you’re away on vacation, the better to rob your house.

Customer data could also give hackers a way to bring down the grid. Smart meters injected with malware, for instance, could disrupt the grid just as networks of PC botnets—home computers hijacked by viruses—now disrupt the Internet. A network of drone smart meters could cause a swath of the grid to power down, throwing off the grid’s electrical load. The imbalance would send large flows of electricity back to generators, severely damaging them or even blowing them up. _SciAm

The integrated electronics in the "smart grid" will also make the Obama Grid more prone to devastating damage from an EMP attack or a solar storm.

In uncertain economic times such as the current Obama Depression, it makes more sense to toughen the power grid to make it more resistant to hacking and the various forms of catastrophic failure. Instead, it seems almost as if the Obama regime wants to make the US more vulnerable, rather than less.

cross-posted to Al Fin Energy