Re: kinetics

[Robert Graham <robert_david_graham () yahoo com>]

In my experience in the third world, a leading cause of outages is an employee in the control center hitting the 'off' 
switch. Despite the equivalent of the Big Red Button with a sign above it saying "Don't touch", they touch it. Of 
course, when they do that, they say "I don't now what happened, it just turned itself off".

A large number of airplane crashes on blamed on computer bugs. It's often the first reason they come up with when they 
can't explain what happened otherwise. For example, the Air France crash over the Atlantic last year was first assumed 
to be a computer error. But, later investigations have failed to find ANY crashes that are due to computer bugs.

Today we experience "hackers in the gap". Whenever there is a gap, something you can't explain, then the first 
assumption is that it must have been a hacker who did it. In truth, some of those cases might be right, but the 
overall, it's a fallacy.





________________________________
From: Dave Aitel <dave () immunityinc com>
To: dailydave () lists immunityinc com
Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 10:08 AM
Subject: [Dailydave] kinetics


So yesterday, Chile was without power for a bit. Technically it's their third blackout in three days. Why? Who knows? 
Perhaps it's unknowable in some mathematical or philosophical sense. Or perhaps as the WashPost says: " The reasons 
remain unclear, but failures in the transmission grid are suspected."

These aren't "modern" grids apparently, so no doubt instead of
      running Windows XP they are running Windows NT 4 + a very old
      version of Hydrogen[1]. 

Likewisetwo trains crashed in Shanghai - they'd switched to manual equipment since the high tech signaling equipment 
"stopped working". 

You know what's complete balderdash? When people say "The US is
      much more heavily invested in high tech networking processes, and
      hence, more vulnerable to a cyber attack than everyone else."
      People say this sort of thing all the time. Not sure why.

And, in completely unrelated news, WhitePhosphorus released two SCADA exploits in their CANVAS Exploit Pack update 
today. They have 114 exploits right now, and "if you don't have it, you don't have it", as they say. :>

-dave
[1] I jest, of course. Modern Hydrogen works fine on NT4! ;> 


 
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