Bad News for the Cyberterrorism Protection Racket

A while back This Sunday, 60 Minutes did a piece on how hackers created a massive blackout in Brazil.

Only it wasn't any sort of computer problem, it was poorly maintained power lines, where soot (carbon is conductive) created short circuits which took down the line:

Brazil’s independent systems operator group later confirmed that the failure of a 345-kilovolt line “was provoked by pollution in the chain of insulators due to deposits of soot” (.pdf). And the National Agency for Electric Energy, Brazil’s energy regulatory agency, concluded its own investigation in January 2009 and fined Furnas $3.27 million (.pdf) for failing to maintain the high-voltage insulators on its transmission towers.

Also look at their additional links:

• No Chinese Hackers Found in Florida Outage Either
• Did Hackers Cause the 2003 Northeast Blackout? Umm, No
• Put NSA in Charge of Cyber Security, Or the Power Grid Gets It

So, as it stands right now, the only people claiming this have no proof, but are likely to get contracts, if they are private, or additional government money, if they are public.

The issue here is the vulnerability of the grid, see the 2003 blackout, and the problem is that since privatizing electric utilities, they have skimped on infrastructure, leaving no margin for error.