Re: Northeast, Canada power failure exposes infrastructure frailty

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

Forwarded from: Dragos Ruiu <dr () kyx net>

On August 15, 2003 12:58 am, InfoSec News wrote:
> Forwarded from: William Knowles <wk () c4i org>
>
> http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/recovery/story/0,10801
> ,84042,00.html
>
> By DAN VERTON
> AUGUST 14, 2003
>
> Federal and state emergency officials are scrambling to determine
> the source of a major power outage that rippled through the
> northeast from New York to Canada and as far west as Detroit.
>
> While it is too early to tell exactly what caused the cascading
> failure, which hit about 4 p.m. EDT, national security experts said
> it was a prime example of how fragile the nation's critical
> infrastructures are to both self-inflicted disruptions and
> deliberate sabotage.

Some authoritative info... (my father consults with a team now doing
some analysis on their logs about this)

The entire outage failure was a cascade failure that took 9 seconds to
occur. DC isolation between grid regions stopped propagation.

It will take months to determine the true cause, because of the volume
of crashdump logs that needs to be analyzed. Interestingly the problem
they have is much like one of analyzing packet traces, time-stamp
synchronization. Skew in the multiple companies timebases needs to be
corrected for to get the accurate picture of what happened.

The initial speculation is that one of the twin joint US/Canada
operated 1.2 GW hydro plants (that is a lot of capacity since the
entire province of Alberta is about 8GW) at Niagara Falls dropping out
was a major catalyst in the pathological failure cascade that was
triggered.

This is the third such outage the American power grid has seen since
DC isolated zones were set up, the first in 1965, the second in 1978.  
There was also another incident about half this size in 1996 in the
western region, where most but not all of a region went out.

The power system as a network probably counts as one of the most
reliable things humans have ever built. Three major region failures in
4+ decades is still not such a bad track record. Not what I would call
fragile - sorry to dissapoint the fear mongers. And to throw a wet
blanket on the "cyberterrorism" FUD, the power system engineering has
many redundant physical procedures that complement the electronic
systems - it would take some substantial knowledge of power systems
specifics to be able to deliberately or electronically cause an outage
of this magnitude.

cheers,
--dr

-- 
pgpkey http://dragos.com/ kyxpgp



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