WONKS: AL QAEDA WON’T TURN OUT THE LIGHTS

So, was the great black­out of ’03 a sign that Osama is about to shut down the power grid?
Phil Anderson, a home­land secu­rity guru at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, doesn’t think so.
Last fall, Anderson helped put together a high-​​level sim­u­la­tion, “Silent Vector.” In it, the bad guys unleashed mul­ti­ple attacks on America’s “energy infra­struc­ture.“
“We looked at a hit on the power grid for Silent Vector,” Anderson tells Defense Tech. But the strike was ruled out, “because it was well within the realm of the too hard to do.“
“It would require dozens of sub­sta­tions being blown up to shut all of the power down,” he adds.
If that’s the case, how did last week’s black­out hap­pen so eas­ily, so sud­denly?
“It’s a com­plete mys­tery to me,” Anderson says. “It doesn’t jive with any of the research we’ve done.“
THERE’S MORE: Slate’s Fred Kaplan doesn’t think Al-​​Qaeda could cause another power grid shut­down, either. He cites a Gartner sim­u­lated attack on the lights, done for the Naval War College. Like Anderson, those wonks thought it would take “the phys­i­cal destruc­tion of key trans­mis­sion bot­tle­necks” in order to turn the power off, Kaplan says. They also believed that such strikes would have to be accom­pa­nied by cyber-​​attacks.
That’s becom­ing less and less pos­si­ble, Kaplan notes, rely­ing on a ZDNet arti­cle for evi­dence.
“Invading key nodes of the elec­tri­cal net­work, whether by hack­ing or whack­ing, is very dif­fi­cult and get­ting harder.“
AND MORE: A Qaeda-​​linked group is tak­ing respon­si­bil­ity for the black­outs, accord­ing to WorldTribune​.com.
AND MORE: “I’m scratch­ing my head over this group of sto­ries,” says one Defense Tech reader. “In June 1997 the NSA did a No-​​Notice Interoperability Exercise known as Eligible Receiver. While the report is still clas­sifed, what lit­tle has come to light is that the 30+ mem­bers of the red team using open source tools found off the Internet had the capa­bil­ity to shut off the power in nine major cities, not to men­tion tak­ing over sev­eral U.S. Commands around the globe and at the Pentagon.“
Many peo­ple, how­ever, have dissed Eligibile Receiver as a boogey­man, used to hype up the “cyber-​​terror” threat.

August 18th, 2003 | Homeland Security | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.