Are you ready if the power grid gets hacked?

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Originally Posted By: quint
I have nothing. No water, no generator, no stored food. Short of a nuclear EMP attack, I dont see any of this doomsday garbage happening. And if by some chance it did, it would be so awful that life would never be "normal" again in my lifetime, probably not my kids for that matter. I wouldnt want to be here. And wont be.


I agree..and if you need anything in particular..it will be on the ground somewhere.
 
Originally Posted By: turtlevette
The power grid is not sophisticated enough to be hacked. How do you hack springs and levers? Most of the computerized portions are islanded local networks.

You might be able to hack in and look at your neighbors bill...

Understand that in the USA the grid is designed and operated by some of the most conservative people on the planet. They're just not sure about this computer fad thing.





They will take down the transformers....possibly destroy them in an attack. This would cripple the system for months.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304851104579359141941621778
 
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Originally Posted By: Doog
Originally Posted By: turtlevette
The power grid is not sophisticated enough to be hacked. How do you hack springs and levers? Most of the computerized portions are islanded local networks.

You might be able to hack in and look at your neighbors bill...

Understand that in the USA the grid is designed and operated by some of the most conservative people on the planet. They're just not sure about this computer fad thing.





They will take down the transformers....possibly destroy them in an attack. This would cripple the system for months.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304851104579359141941621778


That site has a gazillion ads running. You want to believe it so you can feel good about that generator purchase?

We have spares. We have spare capacity. Transformers are pretty stout. You can shoot it and someone will be there in minutes to plug the holes and add oil. The bushings are most fragile part being porcelain. They stock lots of spares. Stuff blowsup naturally all the time and we just switch around it. There are many more power plants than needed. Lots of spare capacity.

But don't let me spoil your fantasies.
 
I'm more concerned about Alien attacks than from humans...We don't really know whats outs there, and they're more likely to be bad azzes than intellectuals...just watch the movie Independence Day!
 
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Originally Posted By: Doog
Al said:
You must have missed the grid failure 12 years ago in the Northeast.....

lol..you mean the one where a portion of the northeast grid was off line for a few hours. Granted some lost power for 1 day+, but that was a small number.

I remember reading about in in Pa. We had a 1/2 second blackout...lol. How about a better example.
Click to expand...
 
Correct me if I'm looking at it wrong, but didn't we go through this in 2008 and 1998 ? Huge swaths of the grid went down.
 
I have lost power for near 1 week twice over. It was pure misery with no water(electric well) and paltry heat. One was an ice storm the other a large wind storm.

I have a 8500watt generator now and 15 gallons of fuel, two bath tubs to fill with household water and 10 food grade(honey) 5 gallon buckets with bottom tap I can use to store water.

Not super worried.
 
Originally Posted By: Doog
Originally Posted By: turtlevette
The power grid is not sophisticated enough to be hacked. How do you hack springs and levers? Most of the computerized portions are islanded local networks.

You might be able to hack in and look at your neighbors bill...

Understand that in the USA the grid is designed and operated by some of the most conservative people on the planet. They're just not sure about this computer fad thing.





They will take down the transformers....possibly destroy them in an attack. This would cripple the system for months.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304851104579359141941621778



The only thing a cyber attack could possibly do, assuming they can get thru all the multiple firewalls, is open Breakers and dump load. Utilities could island and manually use cold load pickup and restore the power, I mean their have been huge ice storms which essentially do the same thing!

What the bad guys could do is shoot armor piercing rounds thru the large high voltage transformers which are the back bone of the 345Kv system and above. these units have very little redundancy and a loss of a single unit is a major problem, note spares are not availble in most case and lead times are 3-4 yrs from receipt of PO. The pols worry about Cyber non-sense but that is not what would probably happen.
 
I am not so sure about the emp thing. The power grid is fused. We has a lightening hit a few years ago that knocked out out power . The power company guy came by and replaced the fuse on the transformer on the power pole and we were with power.
 
Originally Posted By: gathermewool
If it actually got bad, and by bad I mean dangerous or we are at risk of not having the essentials, I'd get on NFAAS immediately, while on my way to base to await further direction.

My job is a pretty safe and secure location, too, and I'd tend to think they'd do something to take care of us...maybe not.

Besides that, I've got a few bags of chips, some nuts (residents not inclusive,) a BB gun and several knives, a small WEN generator with enough gas to get us through AT LEAST 4 hours of the rough stuff, batteries to keep us lit for a month, and some other canned and non-canned goods that I can't think of right now.

On a serious note, there are many events that we are at imminent risk of falling victim to, from a likelihood of 'very' to 'nil,' every single day. I could be wrong, and I know this isn't the forum to admit this, but I don't deem the risk high enough to stock up on anything.


Agreed!
 
Originally Posted By: supton
Correct me if I'm looking at it wrong, but didn't we go through this in 2008 and 1998 ? Huge swaths of the grid went down.

It was huge only for the people involved. For the other mega millions of customers..not so much.

Tinfoil Hat-ism is at work here.
 
If we have a quake my area will be shut off from los angelas and vegas...The biggest problem will be the people that were not prepared in any way. When desperation sets in they will go looking for food and water and will stop at nothing to get it. I have guns and ammo to protect me and my family.
 
The power grid communications system I'm somewhat familiar with has no connection to the public internet so there's no hacking it from there. There are hardly any leased lines from the telcos any more as they don't want to sell and support them. If you did hack one of those you might lose some small data stream, but generation drop and circuit breaker operations aren't on those types of circuits as they are too slow. I agree that the transformers are the most vulnerable assets on most power systems. Conductor and insulators are kept on hand. I feel that earthquake is what's likely to cause the biggest problems.
 
Given that both nuclear and non-nuclear EMP weapons exist and have been, and are currently being developed, it's not exactly a tin-foil hat argument. I'd agree that it depends on both the abilities of the attacker and the vulnerabilities of the victim to make a bad event catastrophic. "Hacking" might be a bit of a misnomer.

At present, I'd probably see this as more of a military event versus a terrorist event, but that could change over time. Public utilities have been shown to have fairly poor security when tested, which would lead me to believe that a motivated attacker could do more damage than what actually SHOULD happen under the current safeguards. I think that's an impetus for this becoming a bigger issue recently as it's not a new threat...just more people are taking it seriously.
 
Originally Posted By: Al
Tinfoil Hat-ism is at work here.


It seems to be the official headwear of BITOG.
 
I would say most folks aren't prepared at all for a power failures. Our local PD bemoans the fact that if the power goes out for more than a minute, people are calling them frantically about when it will be on again.

Although the 2003 northeast blackout was widespread, it wasn't very long. I was without power for about 6 hours. I had some water stored up, I pulled the rope so I could open the garage door manually to park my car, managed to cook dinner lighting the gas stove with a lighter, turned on my battery powered lantern and lit the oil lamps for light, listened to the battery powered radio for the news, had a glass of wine and read a book after dinner. Found it a rather peaceful experience, actually. Next day, folks at work acted like it was the end of the world; they couldn't get their cars out of the garage because they didn't know to pull the rope, they had no idea how to cook without electricity, and they acted like I was MacGyver when I told them how I handled it.

Now I think I could go a couple days at least; I have a generator, some canned goods, a camp stove, and camp gear. Could sleep in the popup camper if I needed heat.
 
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