There are things to be concerned about and things to be downright worried about. This story – which outlines what appears to be woefully lax security at The Tennessee Valley Authority, the largest public power company in the United States – fits firmly in the latter category.
InformationWeek reports that a General Accountability Report released this week found that the TVA was in sorry shape. The authority did not dispute the report, and says that it is already working on 17 of the 19 identified problems.
A recent Inquirer story, which uses the same House hearing mentioned in the InformationWeek piece as a jumping off point, describes the Aurora Vulnerability in more detail – and provides many more reasons to worry. The piece beings by saying that the release of the video, which showed how a generator in Idaho in a test was made to self-destruct, was “an extremely dumb thing to do.” What is perhaps even more frightening is that it doesn’t seem that a whole lot has been done since to obviate the threat.
James Langevin (D.-R.I), the chairman of the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats Cybersecurity and Science and Technology, said that DHS had not provided enough detail on the test, that power companies worked too slowly to fix the issues and that the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) did not performing its oversight job.
That’s scary enough. But the pièce de résistance was the dismissive attitude of NERC. The information given to the House by the group that supposedly showed progress was found to have been “thrown together a couple of days before the hearing.” Bill Pascrell (D.-N.J.), a member of the subcommittee, asked NERC if it thought House members are “a bunch of jerks.”
There is no shortage of scary angles to the story of
Hopefully, the government will begin taking
Several layers of distinction (between physical and information-based attacks, between local and remote, between personal and public, and between economic and military) are fading. These changes tend to heighten the danger. Lauri Almann, Estonia Permanent Undersecretary of Defense, added that the world is in a state of
At least some people are paying attention. This release says that the American Water Works Association (AWWA) and DHS released a document entitled “Roadmap to Secure Control Systems in the Water Sector” which outlines the design, installation and maintenance of control systems that can operate through a