Comment by jacquesm
12 hours ago
Then you're missing the point.
If they succeed they may well not be reversible. The question is if this had succeeded would we have shrugged it off again or responded appropriately?
12 hours ago
Then you're missing the point.
If they succeed they may well not be reversible. The question is if this had succeeded would we have shrugged it off again or responded appropriately?
Can you give some examples of? I can imagine that under the right circumstances you might succeed in blowing up some transformers or even a turbine, but it seems like you’d be up to speed within a month or two on the outside? Or am I missing the gravity somehow?
Pardon? A month or two without power does not seem like an enormous crisis?
Stuxnet destroyed centrifuges. It does not seem impossible that a sophisticated attack could shred some critical equipment. During the Texas 2021 outage -they were incredibly close to losing the entire grid and being in a blackstart scenario. Estimates were that it could take weeks to bring back power - all this without any physical equipment destroyed or malicious code within the network.
Edit: Had to look it up, the Texas outage was "only" two weeks and scattershot in where it hit. The death toll is estimated at 246-702.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
> Or am I missing the gravity somehow?
Yes, there is the risk of cascading failures, some industrial processes are very hard to re-start once interrupted (or even impossible) and the lead time on 'some transformers' can be a year or more. These are nothing like the kind that you can buy at the corner hardware store. A couple of hundred tons or so for the really large ones.
Grid infra is quite expensive, hard to replace and has very long lead times.
The very worst you could do is induce oscillations.
Transformers and turbines of any significance are not off the shelf parts and can have lead times of years
> Transformers and turbines of any significance are not off the shelf parts and can have lead times of years
Bloomberg had a decent article[0] about transformers and their lead time. They're currently a bottleneck on building. It wasn't paywalled for me.
"The Covid-19 pandemic strained many supply chains, and most have recovered by now. The supply chain for transformers started experiencing troubles earlier — and it’s only worsened since. Instead of taking a few months to a year, the lead time for large transformer delivery is now three to five years. " [0]
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-bottlenecks-transfor...
How do they not have backups??
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I've seen less-than-credible software in an ATM and in a "ring up your own groceries" station. No idea who's behind it or who would care, though.
It's middle of winter, and it gets pretty danged cold. Being without power in such weather might well end up being deadly, even with short durations.
Consider that if a cyberattack could destroy a major power grid transformer, for a marginal cost approaching zero, versus the low-end US$10 million a Kinzal ballistic missile would cost to do the same thing (presuming you only need 1 which is...unlikely), that that might be a significant military capability.
I wasn't commenting on any particular case. I was stating that flipping a switch is less costly to reverse than blowing up a dam.
These attacks are not at the level of 'flipping a switch'. If they succeed they can destabilize the grid and that has the potential to destroy gear, and while not as costly as blowing up a dam it can still be quite costly.
During WW2 both germany and the UK as example were carpet bombed to assail industry, does that help you to understand my position better?
Vietnam too.
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