Sunday, March 18, 2018

The rise of "Grizzly Steppe"






"Time to wake up people. This threat is real. It is not hyperbole. It is just a matter of time."



Me thinks we are watching the wrong show. We are so concerned about the Russians trying to meddle with our elections, we are not seeing what the other hand is doing. And by the way, most of the meddling has not been the Russians messing with voting machines. Rather, it was putting "fake news" on social media about certain candidates. THAT really upsets me! If anyone is to do "fake news" around here, it is CNN and MSNBC!

Did you know that in 2016, the state of Vermont was the victim of a Russian hack? On their voting machines? Nope. On their electric grid. The Russian operation was dubbed Grizzly Steppe by the Obama Administration. The purpose of the operation was to inject malware into the Burlington Electric system. The malware was designed to go out into the grid. Fortunately, the area of the infection was autonomous, and not connected to the grid. To me, this was a warning shot, heard loud and clear.

Oh, the Russians have meddled before. In December of 2015, the Russian group Sandworm injected it's malicious code BlackEnergy3 into the Ukrainian power grid. 80,000 residents lost power for six hours. So what, one might ask. Nobody died, did they? No - that is true. Nobody died. However, this was just a harbinger of what might be yet to come. 

Did you know that this past Friday, Energy Secretary Perry testified on the Hill about the prolonged cyber attacks on our grid in 2017? I was not aware of it. But it happened. Not once, but many times. Again, another warning shot.

How bad can things get with our ancient grid? In the graphic above, this picture from space shows the United States during the 2003 northeast electric grid failure. Now imagine the entire country looking like the northeast did in 2003. And not just for a few hours, try a few months - or longer. That transcends meddling. That is murder on a massive scale.

I for one am sick and tired of this crap. I really am. We knew about the vulnerabilities of our grid since the 1980's. We knew about EMP threats. We knew about the coming cyber threats. We knew how to harden our grid, how to make it smarter. Yet we have done nothing. With the massive amounts of money authorized in the Stimulus Bill  in the early years of the Obama Administration, we could have taken part of that funding and fixed our grid. Yet we did nothing. 

Messing with another county's electric grid should be considered an act of war. It should not be trivialized. People will die from exposure, hunger, dehydration and disease. Our lifestyles will go from good to barely survivable in an instant. Are we just going to sit here an wait for the next intrusion of Grizzly Steppe, BlackEnergy3, or something worse? 

Time to wake up people. This threat is real. It is not hyperbole. It is just a matter of time.   




2 comments:

  1. I wouldn't last a week if we were hit with an energy system virus. I am not a doomsday prepper, have all my assets in institutions that require electricity to operate and have few survival skills. I would imagine I would take my few weapons and ammo and try to take what I need.
    It's not just the threat to the grid that worries me, it is the pervasive nature of the internet and social media on our lives, uncontrollable, not fact checked, uncensored and unregulated.
    We have now reached the point where an unaccountable private corporation is holding detailed data on over a quarter of the world’s population.
    Facebook and its executives faced a torrent of backlash on Saturday following news reports that the data firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked on the Trump campaign in 2016, improperly harvested private information from 50 million Facebook users.
    Zuckerberg and his company (and others) have been avoiding responsibility for some time. Governments everywhere need to get serious in how they deal with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etal.

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    1. Russia, NORK and China have government based agencies with thousands of hackers trolling our systems and creating huge databases of vulnerable locations and methods to infiltrate them. We have nothing similar.
      US hackers are primarily anti-government, anti-social nerds working in their parents basements. They have equivalent skills to the enemies, but neither the desire nor interest in helping the country. And they are not a coordinated group with vast resources to aid them.
      We are at the mercy of those that have identified and capitalized on our weaknesses and can use them when the time is appropriate for their nefarious needs.
      God help us all.

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