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Comment by anotheryou | Hacker News Reader

"You could imagine it happening to a machine in an actual plant, and it would be terrible"

He still hasn't fully grasped it yet or else he'd have said:

"You could imagine it happening to all machines in all plants at the same time, and it would be terrible"

it’s a technicality, but if you do this to all the machines at precise same time it would not work. the attack relies on the grid being there and leveraging the power it generates to destroy one piece of equipment.

that said, you could take out a significant number by performing the attack in a serial fashion

You can definitely do this to all of them at the same time. And only one would survive. Why? Because out of sync does not mean the out of sync frequency is the same to all of them. SO you have machine1 at 70 HZ, machine 2 at 30 HZ and so on. Connect all them together out of sync in the grid and you get them all fight each other. Do this maliciously 10 times and in under a minute all but one are totaled, like the one in the video from article.

Inductance in the grid would probably be sufficient to destroy them all, even if they were the only equipment on the grid and they were all destroyed at once. It's a lot of power flowing.

Given that the failure mode seems to rely on force applied to a specific generator from other generators this particular attack could only take down some percentage of all running generators at any given time correct?

Sure, but the OC was clearly alluding to the fact that the real risk is a true mass attack. If you could do anything to every generator, what is the worst thing you could do? If you use this technique you could probably blow out some percentage of generators. Would that take down the grid? For how long? How hard would it be to recover? We already know power grids can be taken down by cyberattacks, just look at the cyberattack Russia did against Ukraine's power grid [1]. The main difference is that they were probably not trying to permanently take down their grid. If you could do something that would destroy enough capacity to keep the grid down for months the casualties would be immense. There would be immediate consequences like the loss of heating and cooling resulting in exposure deaths, but these pale in comparison to losses of fresh water, fuel production and thus food transport, fertilizer production and thus food production, manufacturing and thus goods, cargo port throughput and thus shipping. Modern society in the developed world utterly depends on our power grid.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/russia-ukraine-cyberattack-power...

I think it's not unlikely that a very high percentage of these protective relay is from the same manufacturer running the same "operating system" with the same vulnerability.

With that it doesn't matter if it's the same hardware model and also not which generator sits behind it. From the article it sounds like that force would have killed any generator.

Where is that force coming from though?

the grid?

you're thinking of this?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24911509

Reply on news.ycombinator.com