Occupy Corporatism
by Susanne Posel
Market analyst John Kemp claims to know how to make the energy grid in the US safer from terrorism and attackers.
Kemp explained that although these compromises are “not new” and the “grid’s interconnectedness is both its greatest strength and greatest weakness”, it is localized failure that effects “each city or region” in generation of energy and distribution.
Kemp warns that “once power plants and transmission systems were linked together, it was possible for a single fault to propagate or cascade across a much larger area, even in the worst instance a whole region.”
One way to fix the problem, according to Kemp, would be to maintain confidentiality of procedures at power stations to keep leaks from happening and prevent attackers from gaining access in internal information.
However, “in the case of the power grid, the solution is not just, or mainly, to protect critical substations from physical attack. It is also to make them less critical to the operation of the network by building in more redundancy.”
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) released a report based assumptions about energy grid attacks which resulted in the assertion that “coordinated attacks in each of the nation’s three separate electric systems could cause the entire power network to collapse.”
Using predictive models that require specific data to ensure a specific prediction, the FERC claims that they will look into imposing “security standards”.
The report point to attacks that necessitate those security standards based on a 2 day test last November that “simulated a coordinated cyber and physical and included some 2,000 people from 234 organizations, including DOE, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.”
In 2013, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) was involved in a nationwide drill that incorporated utilities corporation executives, stakeholders, National Guardsmen, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) antiterrorism division and international partners from Canada and Mexico to prepare for an emergency drill that would “simulate physical attacks and cyberattacks that could take down large sections of the power grid.”
Indeed nearly 200 utilities corporations and various organizations have agreed to participate in the drill to expand on the idea of having “a loss of power for” an extended period of time “to explore how governments would react as the loss of the grid crippled the supply chain for everyday necessities.”
To accomplish this, the blueprint entitled GridEx II will be implemented, as modeled after the initial GridEx drill that was held in 2011.
In the subsequent report “2011 NERC Grid Security Exercise: After Action Report” released in 2012, the regulatory agency found that:
• Utilities corporations needed “additional training” to “enhance preparedness”
• Clearer communication “across industry”, NERC and the government should not be limited because of “concerns about compliance implications”
• An Information Sharing task Force (ISTF) should be installed to “develop guidance and outreach strategies” to enable cross information sharing
• Centralized coordination must be understood throughout the industry as a mandated response to a power grid shutdown
• Appropriate policies implemented to “secure the grid [from] physical intrusions into infrastructure can have grave cyber implications, entities should ensure their response protocols address a coordinated threat”
SCADA Systems, a corporation that provides industrial automation technology to agencies surveilling the energy grid was targeted for an elaborate hack of their facilities in the US and Spain.
In a statement representatives from SCADA said: “We do not have any reason to believe that the intruder(s) acquired any information that would enable them to gain access to a customer system or that any of the compromised computers have been connected to a customer system.”
SCADA is connected through networks to power plants, water-treatment facilities, traffic lights and other “critical infrastructure”.
ConspiracyAnalyst.org 