>This is true of basically all literary journalism. How do so many interesting things happen to these people that they can write about it? Easy, they make it up.
It is not all made up.
>“There is just a very shallow truth in facts,” he told me. “Otherwise, the phone directory would be the Book of Books.”
They knew enough to shoot a part that is filled with fluid and hard to replace.
They might have lacked the knowledge of "the grid" to make such an attack go beyond one county, but there was some degree of thought put into that attack.
I think it probably doesn't take an electrical engineer to figure out that destroying the radiators would put the substation out of action at least temporarily, but it does show they put a bit of thought into it at least. It doesn't seem like a case of a dumbass using the substation for target practice on a whim, it all seems very deliberate and purposeful.
While we don't know, for now, the level of deliberation and knowledge is congruent with various instructional materials that circulate in darker corners of the net (I don't want to name specific publications/sources). You can find pretty detailed advice and discourse about how to plan and execute an attack on the infrastructure unit, ie the substation.
Information about the larger structure of the grid, transmission direction, system redundancies/tolerances, failure cascades is a lot harder to come by. You could build up a picture by accumulating OSINT resources, mapping gaps, making physical observations etc., but synthesizing that into any sort of working model of the grid itself would require some pretty advanced engineering expertise and a lot of institutional knowledge even at the local level. Anyone with sufficient smarts, training, and know-how is a lot more likely to be invested in the integrity of the grid than its sabotage.
Also, in purely economic terms it's not efficient for an antagonist to max out resources on trying to land a decisive masterstroke. It takes a lot of time, money, and moving parts to pull off such an attack. An ongoing rash of cheap micro-attacks, even poorly correlated, drives up costs in ratchet fashion, without any threat being sufficiently expensive to bring about massive change (eg burying major parts of the transmission infrastructure, switching to a different architecture, radically different security posture). The strategic goal is to raise the cost of 'normal' above the market's willingness to bear, and then exploit social/political failure modes.
The damage could have been much more difficult to repair.
"If the windings within the transformer itself were damaged, it would probably require replacement of the equipment. Transformers of this scale are rarely manufactured without an order, which means we don’t have a lot of spares sitting around, and the lead time can be months or years to get a new one delivered, let alone installed."
It's not the radiators, it's the transformator itself.
Shorted winding == complete replacement needed for high voltages, and a single bullet would be more than enought to break insulation on the winding many times.
A lot of infrastructure is built with some concept of defense in mind from public trash cans to nuclear power plants.
The electrical grid is largely ignored because it’s so big and distributed over such a large area it’s difficult for small groups to attack it successfully. So the focus is on limiting cascading failures. Shooting equipment only caused local damage and things got back to normal in a week.
It was unpleasant for those affected, but you can catch people conducting repeated attacks a lot easier than you can harden all this infrastructure.
"The rise was caused by heavy military vehicles stirring contaminated soil in the 4,000-sq-km (2,485 sq-mile) exclusion zone surrounding the abandoned plant, Ukraine's State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate reported ."
"Close to the reactor, you would normally receive a dose of about three units - called microsieverts - every hour. But on Thursday, that jumped to 65 microSv/hrs - about five times more than you would get on one transatlantic flight."
https://web.archive.org/web/20220225165134/https://www.bbc.c...
65 microSv or 65 µSv is a really trivial amount. It should inspire a yawn not a yikes.
Doesn’t sound trivial. You go on enough high altitude flights, you will suffer cellular damage- and this dose is occurring daily. Furthermore, this current situation could easily worsen if further damage is done to the nuclear plants.
In the current climate I would have assumed it was Russian probing of critical infrastructure. There have been isolated attacks on pipelines, transport, and communication cables in various western countries.
>"Here, fill it out again and don't mention that."
>I had the exact same experience when applying for a clearance while I was in college
Speaking as someone on the autistic spectrum, this is why the entire clearance process is a joke and has been since I had the misfortune of meeting some of these spooks as a child.
They claim that the one thing that will preclude you is lying, but obviously as posts like these demonstrate, that's not the case.
I still remember going on a date with a woman who was recently divorced... she told me about traveling up and down Baja California for RAND (smoking her brains out along the way).
I've met a ton of these people -- they'd have been precluded from federal employment back in the day just for being divorced... or a woman... or a myriad of other things... but somehow they manage to get these cushy roles and cling to them.
I've since quit doing any job interviews... at all. I got the sense folks were treating them like free consulting sessions, so I'm very purposefully showing up in the comments when something comes up in the news and refusing to "stop posting".
At the end of the day, if you "do a clearance", you're helping perpetuate war crimes, and it's been that way since Iraq, arguably as far back as when the draft ended.
(I got the sense they, the royal they, "the feds" were aggrieved I kept applying to the agencies in my hometown, but hey, I was born here, and I'm not required to ignore antisocial behavior. It's not my fault if it begins to look like you're abusing someone you met as a child -- denying them employment in the private sector then overpolicing their applications in the public service)
I'd avoid them at all costs. There is one in my hometown. (Software Engineering Institute)
It's employees love to stroll off onto online dating sites and list of things like drug use, foreign ties, or... other things that would preclude a clearance, then act aggrieved that someone like this poster thinks people who want to weaken the internet under the guise of national security shouldn't also obstruct them from private employment and have done so since the days of "don't ask don't tell".
I interviewed with CERT a couple times... and I got a PA MMJ card after rather than have one more job interview treated like a free consulting session, and I suspect the solarwinds breach happened because so many people who shouldn't have clearances use their positions to obstruct perfectly good candidates because they feel threatened if the tech savvy at risk youth of Appalachia are lifted out of precarity.
Do not work for these people -- stay in the private sector then get a barista gig or something when you have a nest egg.
>If becomes widely known that the government can de-cloak Tor users, that will change the behaviour of their targets and so hurt their surveillance, so it's fairly common that the government wants to hide this fact. (same with stingrays, for example).
As was discussed verbally at Defcon, a huge chunk of the exit nodes are either in the US or EU. Same for guards.
(The whole GCHQ vs several EU countries trying to do intel in parallel without a shared intelligence agency thing is perpetually amusing.)
It is not all made up.
>“There is just a very shallow truth in facts,” he told me. “Otherwise, the phone directory would be the Book of Books.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/04/24/the-ecstatic-t...