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Comment by merlinscholz | Hacker News Reader

The book Sandworm by Andy Greenberg also goes a little into depth about attacking powerplants and other industrial control systems. Can highly recommend!

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"attacking powerplants and other industrial control systems. Can highly recommend!"

Sounds fun, but please not in my neighbourhood ..

Power grids are typically only designed to tollerate one or two major faults at once, so if you mess with enough powerplants at the same time you might be able to trigger a failure that cascades through the entire powergrid. In the 2006 European Blackout [1] a single poorly executed line cut led to a cascading failure that left 10 million people over 5 countries without power for two hours.

So better stay a couple countries away from me with experiments. Or maybe don't, better a benevolent chaos monkey than being hit unprepared by your enemy.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout

A similar thing almost happened recently because of a Romanian power plant. And there was also an incident in Kosovo a few years ago that caused a slight frequency decrease that caused all sorts of problems.

I suppose with the state-level hacking of the powergrid is, most can do it, but won't because the enemy can do so, too. So like the nuclear standoff. Nobody uses it, because the enemy can wreck your shit, too.

But the whole grid needs a rework. Also because of renewables and batteries etc. To better react do changing demand and enable a free market, where it is easy to buy and sell power.

Yep it's great. Countdown to Zeroday by Kim Setter about Stuxnet is awesome also.

Coincidentally, I just ordered this book seconds ago. I've also heard only good things about it!

The book is amazing! The technical analysis by Symantec [1] also makes for a very good complementary read.

[1] [PDF] https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2010/11/w32_s...

Yeh I've given it to techies and non-techies as it's very readable and suits both audiences.

Seconded!

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