This is bound to bolster the windmill/solar panel crowd.
The US Department of Home Security and the FBI have confirmed a series of attacks by hackers targeting companies operating America's nuclear power plants.
The attacks were first detected in May. No details of how many attacks may have succeeded or what sort of systems or data were affected.
Scary.
ReplyDeleteala... WHY THE FUTURE DOESN'T NEED US
https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/
Somewhere in N Korea translators are scratching their heads going, "What is this word 'nu-CU-ler' we keep hearing?"
ReplyDeleteCap
Everything connected to the internet is targeted indiscriminately. This story doesn't mean much alone, because it doesn't say if the hacks breached any computers, or what sort of systems were breached. A story in wired sources a statement anonymously that no control systems were breached. https://www.wired.com/story/hack-brief-us-nuclear-power-breach/
ReplyDeleteThey've already hacked into the wind turbines, to the point of controlling them.
The Cuckoo's Egg is a fascinating read about a hacker getting into all sorts of government sites, including supposedly secure military. It's a 30 year old story but many of the vulnerabilities, including the human ones, still exist.
ReplyDeleteThe Cuckoo's Egg
And the What, Me Worry? crowd seeking Bitcoins by scrambling your PC's files is still at it too, and more successfully than these nuclear power plant attackers. The real hackers are waiting for autonomous cars. The blackmail potential is boundless, but we steam off into the future regardless with Silicon Valley pushing a half-arsed agenda to get financial returns as soon as possible, before obvious security loopholes are plugged and first generation bad software is loosed on the public. Greed is the driving force, none of those "entrepreneurs" gives a damn about the consequences - they'll be megaRich by the time problems surface.
ReplyDeleteThis isn't genius level logic to foresee future problems. It's commonsense.
Back in the 1990s, all those American companies stampeding off to China to make bad plastic copies of existing consumer goods for huge profit, did it in the certain knowledge there would eventually be problems back home. It was called "the race to the bottom" which anyone with half a brain could foresee would cause plummeting wages in America and hollowing out of many towns as factories closed. Magazine articles on the problem were everywhere, but then interest faded until it was far too late. So greed and quarterly record dividend announcements overrode commonsense. These days Trump blames China itself but never his greedy oligarch pals who betrayed his country. Logic has disappeared and xenophobic rants have replaced it.