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A cyberattack could wreak destruction comparable to a nuclear weapon
People around the world may be worried about nuclear tensions rising, but I think they're missing the fact that a major cyberattack could be just as damaging—and hackers are already laying the groundwork.
With the U.S. and Russia pulling out of a key nuclear weapons pact—and beginning to develop new nuclear weapons—plus Iran tensions and North Korea again test-launching missiles, the global threat to civilization is high. Some fear a new nuclear arms race.
That threat is serious—but another could be as serious, and is less visible to the public. So far, most of the well-known hacking incidents, even those with foreign government backing, have done little more than steal data. Unfortunately, there are signs that hackers have placed malicious software inside U.S. power and water systems, where it's lying in wait, ready to be triggered. The U.S. military has also reportedly penetrated the computers that control Russian electrical systems.
As someone who studies cybersecurity and information warfare, I'm concerned that a cyberattack with widespread impact, an intrusion in one area that spreads to others or a combination of lots of smaller attacks, could cause significant damage, including mass injury and death rivaling the death toll of a nuclear weapon.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @12:22PM (30 children)
Wow, how dumb can you be? A car crash could be just as damaging to someone's life as a nuclear weapon ... but, in one scenario, life resumes for people not in a crash. In another, you are on top of a radioactive wasteland.
Who gives a fuck if power is out for a week or a month? It's a learning lesson not to download midget porn on your power plant management system, maybe? And as damaging as a nuclear weapon? Fuck, are people this out of touch with reality this day?? Get the fuck outside. Smell the air, or smog. But get the fuck out and stop bullshitting how "cyber" is no different from end of the fucking world for humanity.
If you need to watch a movie, how about The Day After? It's on youtube,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iyy9n8r16hs [youtube.com]
and if you are too fucking lazy to watch entire movie,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VG2aJyIFrA [youtube.com]
yeah, same as "cyber attack".
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 21 2019, @12:33PM (12 children)
Yeah, I'm thinking the author has never lived with weeks (even months) of power and data outage following a Hurricane strike or similar. We were without power for over 6 weeks after Hurricane Andrew, but it wasn't killing people. Even just a couple of years ago, I had a multiple week power outage following a storm - no running water upstairs (no running water at all for the neighbors...) We lived.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Common Joe on Thursday August 22 2019, @01:09PM (11 children)
I'm familiar with Hurricane destruction too, but I have a different conclusion.
The difference between hurricanes and what the article proposes is that only a small percentage of the U.S. is affected by a hurricane. The rest of the U.S. can send bottled water and canned food. Many people already prepped with portable generators. Gasoline can be shipped in. However, if a significant part of the country has no electricity, that means gasoline can't be pumped. Transportation of food and water come to an abrupt standstill. It could be very deadly making Andrea and Katrina look like child's play.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 22 2019, @01:44PM (10 children)
Our gasoline supply is crazy vulnerable - it doesn't take much of a disruption at all for the stations to run dry, and the more widespread the disruption the more crippling it is.
After Katrina and Rita there were some serious compromises made in the Houston area air quality standards, in order to ensure a steady gasoline supply after the offshore refining capacity was knocked out by the storms. Clue: it's not just microplastics and Deepwater Horizon polluting the Gulf of Mexico, that same pollution that was so noxious onshore in 2006-7-8 is regularly discharged out on the offshore platforms, where most of it "dissipates" into the gulf waters before people notice, well, except people who try to eat the fish - there's a definite "crude" flavor to fish caught around the rigs, and the fishes' nature is to gather near structures like that, so lots of fish do get caught near them.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 23 2019, @02:53AM (9 children)
That's not serious. After these crippling incidents, all you can point to is a temporary pulling back of air quality standards? My view is that when rather frivolous regulation takes precedent over genuine emergencies, then we've gone over the waterfall.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 23 2019, @10:23AM (8 children)
Even with those rather frivolous regulations in place, the Texas Gulf coast has some of the highest rates of cancer in the country (thus, the site choice for M.D. Anderson). We, as a family, left our low cost luxury house and high paying job with top of the line benefits to get away from the increased pollution. If you haven't lived in a high pollution city like SouthEast Houston, or Bhopal, you really don't appreciate the human value of "frivolous regulations" which are supposed to be protecting the health and even lives of millions of residents against the financial interests of foreign companies who will save every penny they can regardless of how much those cost saving measures poison the local residents' air and water.
Only in Houston did I have coworkers struck down by "inexplicable" cancer at age 45, unable to smell - at all - like: unaware that a skunk had sprayed in their truck cab, and "shelter in place: there's a pesticide warehouse across town on fire right now and you are under the plume." If all those frivolous regulations were actually followed, your price of gasoline might increase $0.04 per gallon, wouldn't that be a genuine emergency?
What has this to do with the aftermath of Hurricane destruction? Well: the offshore refineries are exempt from most regulation due to their distance from population centers, and the onshore refineries that took over for them "aren't equipped" to meet the current regulations while processing the required volumes of petroleum when the offshore capacity goes online. If this was a two or three month thing, I might call that a genuine emergency situation - hell, I stayed evacuated from Rita for almost a month, because there was no gas in the stations to get back to town. The increased pollution continued after the storms for years - that's not an emergency, that's greed.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 23 2019, @11:44AM (7 children)
Doesn't mean anything without numbers. Then we can determine whether the "highest rate" is meaningful or not - or even if it's actually highest in the first place.
Funny how you get to these hard numbers only when you're just making up shit. Let us recall that this particular discussion started because you described the aftermath of two destructive hurricanes. I don't buy that the regulations in question, if imposed without regard for the emergency conditions so mentioned, would merely result in a modest $0.04 increase. I think instead it would have resulted in massive fuel shortages and huge harm to US society.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 23 2019, @04:39PM (6 children)
Look it up for yourself, I'm not your paid research assistant and even if I were inclined to spend time on Google to curate my own little collection of references that back my experience/opinions, that would have very little value... the sources would be of my own selection, biased by my searches. What you get on a message board is off-the-cuff recollection of life experiences, sans reference - if that is of no value to you then please politely shove off, because that's all you're getting.
The regulations in question had clear, from my perspective unquestionable, positive impact on the quality of life in SouthEast Houston - illustrated most clearly by the sudden change in air quality following the hurricanes, and its very slow return to baseline.
If said regulations were enforced with anything resembling authority, the necessary pollution controls could have been implemented, at small differential cost to "business as usual." $0.04 is, indeed, a BS number, as it was clearly intended to be taken, still - the actual number may in fact be quite a bit smaller, but when $0.04 per gallon is multiplied up and viewed from the source, a $5.7 billion per year expense, OMFG, no way we can let that impact anybody's quarterly bonuses.
Nobody here is advocating massive fuel shortages, but the "emergency measures" were allowed to run as an excuse to flaunt the regulations as long and widely as possible. It wasn't just the fuel refineries who went into "blow and go" mode, since all their crap was in the air the rest of the plants in town also turned down/off their scrubber functions - that shit's expensive to run:
Answer: they wouldn't.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 24 2019, @01:33AM (5 children)
I guess we'll just have to agree that it's not important then.
That's just a natural outcome of absolute enforcement regulations under dire situations, damn the consequences.
I like how in one place you portray the regulations as being low cost, then in another place admit that businesses become far more active, "blow and go" when they aren't under the thumb of this low cost regulation - which incidentally is solid evidence it is not low cost.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:11AM (4 children)
I like how you discount the health and welfare of hundreds of thousands of people affected by the plant which is "saving" $50K per month by not running their scrubbers. What's a case of cancer worth? A thousand cases? Even if this exposure is only running up cancer rates by a few percent, 2.3 million Houston residents -> 500,000 deaths by cancer. Every 1% increase in cancer rate equates to over 60 additional deaths by cancer per year - and Harris county runs ~2% above the national average cancer rates, while Texas as a whole is almost 10% below.
How much is an early death by cancer every 3 days worth?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 24 2019, @10:32AM (3 children)
In the midst of a disaster which threatens the health and welfare of hundreds of thousands of people far more than the pollution would. You should discount the hell out of that too. Here's why.
It's not. Keep in mind that life time exposure to such elevated pollution is moderately detectable increases in cancer rate by those most affected, it's not going to change much to have a couple month burst of pollution.
Compared to hundreds of thousands of deaths over the course of a couple months.
A hell of a lot less than one early death every thirty seconds or less.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 24 2019, @06:53PM (2 children)
Health is more than death by cancer, there's birth defects - a couple of months is pretty critical there, and there's developmental disorders... have a look at New Jersey autism rates, what's that worth?
And, still you're stuck in your tiny little national emergency mindset. My primary point is: greed of the corporate controllers trumps long term expenses spread among the community, and the community's government and enforcement is so controlled by the corporate interests that, when a short term "emergency" crops up, it's bonus time for everyone who shuts off their pollution controls for the following 3+ years, when, with any reasonable expenditure and effort toward implementing practical pollution controls, they could have been back to standard within 3 months. Would it have cost $6 billion dollars? Maybe, spread across all concerned, it might have hit that level to implement the controls - $0.04 per gallon increase for 12-13 months, I think America could handle that.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 25 2019, @01:40AM
Way the fuck less than hundreds of thousands of deaths over a couple of months.
You should be too. After all, that's what the story and this thread is about.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 25 2019, @12:25PM
There's no reason for the scare quotes either. The hurricanes in question were genuine emergencies.
Your whole argument is absurd. I get that a common way to subvert regulation and democracy is to fabricate emergencies or merely delay the return to a non-emergency state. That's why, for example, the US is in 40 or so persistent "emergencies" - which really are superficial declarations by the US president in order that certain states of law and regulation continue forward year after year.
But the story was about something hypothetically as bad as nuking a city - hundreds of thousands of deaths are naturally a consequence of that. At that point, it no longer makes even a little sense to push regulation which supposedly saves a few lives over actions necessary to save hundreds of thousands - even if the polluting businesses stretch out the compromise for a few more years than necessary.
I saw another example of this argument when legont claimed [soylentnews.org] that banks wouldn't operate pre-electronic technologies like huge amounts of paper money because of government regulation requiring things like electronic reporting of transactions - even if the banks no longer could comply with that regulation in any way (say because computers and such no longer work). As if the US would rather kill vast numbers of people than adjust their regulations to a national-scale disaster.
Your continued fact-free blather that such controls would only impose minor costs are irrelevant when your assertions become no longer true.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Wednesday August 21 2019, @01:43PM (6 children)
My family survived the Montreal ice storm two decades ago. So did many others. It destroyed a large part of the electrical distribution infrastructure. We ended up in a shelter at a local hospital. It was two or three weeks before the electricity came on and we could go home again.
Fortunately, electricity was restored to the city's water-purification systems before it failed from fuel shortage for their emergency generators. There was no safe land route onto or off of Montreal island. No one was looking forward to drinking contaminated water.
But it's worth noting that the only reason power was on again so soon was that the Montreal region had the help of electricians from all over the continent to put the power lines up again. That isn't likely to be possible with continent-wide electrical utility destruction, whether by weather- or cyber-attack.
-- hendrik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @03:08PM (2 children)
I would have looked forward to drinking uncontaminated beer then.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday August 21 2019, @03:39PM (1 child)
There's on;y a limited supply of uncontaminated beer when there's no uncontaminated water. The alcohol content of beer helps keep it clean, though, but not perfectly.
Water doet the palen rotten
Die het drinken, dat zijn sotten.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @06:01PM
"de palen" :)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 22 2019, @04:28AM (1 child)
Electricians from all over the continent wouldn't help in case of a continent-wide failure? Is it in their contracts?
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday August 22 2019, @10:15AM
Exactly. It was a matter of other utilities lending out their personnel for an emergency. Not likely to happen if the other utilities have similar emergencies at home. No doubt they -- the utilities or the industrial-scale electricians -- were well-paid.
At home, we also lost two hot-water radiators. We already had a regular plumbing company. As soon as we had electricity again we called the plumbers to come and turn the heat on properly and carefully, which they did, after disconnection the failed radiators. We used electrical heating to heat the house until the regular heating came on. I trekked to a hardware store and bought 9 kilowatts worth of space heaters (all they still had in stock) and struggled to find combinations of outlets that didn't blow fuses.
It was improvisation.
There were no replacement radiators available on the market. Several months later, the plumber called and told me they had found some discarded but functional radiators from somewhere in the southern U.S and they came and installed them.
I don't know what we would have done that winter (it gets cold in Montreal. Back then it usually got down to -40 degrees in January of February). Those temperatures are less common now, twenty years later.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday August 22 2019, @10:19AM
I imagine that similar problems could arise with a cyberattack that destroys transformers by overloading them.
The way that stuxnet destroyed centrifuges in Iran.
Properly co-ordinated over an entire nation, it could cause real misery. Those large transformers aren't lying around in large numbers in electronic surplus stores.
-- hendrik
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @03:05PM (1 child)
The article is trying to get you to equate cyber attack with actual shooting attack, in order that the government can use that as an excuse to attack a random country they blame a cyber attack on.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday August 22 2019, @10:23AM
Quite possibly. All they need to do is announce what enemy they
wantbelieve the malware attack to have come from and they have their target of convenience.(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday August 21 2019, @03:28PM (4 children)
<no-sarcasm>
If power is out for two weeks, civilization will go back to the stone ages. Mass die offs.
No power. No cars. No fuel for cars. No power to pump fuel at stations. No more fuel deliveries. Grocery stores and Hardware stores all picked clean.
No vehicles for police or power company crews.
The thin veneer of civility in our supposed 'civilization' will come off. Things will get very ugly. Mass riots, looting. Stealing and hoarding what little pre-packaged food remains. No fire trucks. No more water pumped into your local water tower to keep the taps flowing and toilets flushing.
Who cares if the power goes off for a couple weeks?
</no-sarcasm>
Therefore it is imperative that all of our critical infrastructure, including but especially our electrical grid and generating plants be connected to the internet ASAP! And upgrade to Windows 98 SE for security reasons.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Thursday August 22 2019, @04:08AM (3 children)
Puerto Rico had no power for a long time after Hurricane Maria, but I never heard about riots and civil unrest. They are certainly not back to the Stone Ages, and excess mortality was maybe 0.1 %, hardly mass die-offs. People are not the animals you think they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @09:37AM
And Hurricane Sandy in 2013, for example. My parents' house in Ohio didn't have power for a week or two. They're not even on the East Coast, which took a direct hit from the storm.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday August 22 2019, @10:27AM
Exactly. There were people in the rest of the world not afflicted by the same storm, and they organized mass food delivery. It's one of the advantages of a global civilization. But it the afflicted area is large enough, such support will not be sufficiently well resourced.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday August 22 2019, @01:56PM
The people of Puerto Rico have probably not assimilated to be afraid of anyone who is slightly different.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday August 22 2019, @02:30PM (2 children)
Uh huh. You will feed yourself how, when the grocery stores can't get supplies because both computers and phones are down?
You will get heat how? When this occurs in January and it is -30 outside your living place?
Where are you going to procure your water from when the stores have none and your pipes don't work? Hope you can be friendly with the gang controlling the fishing pond at your local park.
Infrastructure is supported by the same systems you readily dismiss.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday August 23 2019, @12:12AM (1 child)
Even if one is prepared, the swarm of not prepared will overwhelm. Manhattan folks will expropriate everything; I am looking at you, my Penn state friends with machine guns.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 24 2019, @02:40AM
Unless, those Manhattan folks are dead, of course. There's more bullets in Pennsylvania than there are Manhattan folks.