In case you have not heard, Most of not all Venezuela has been without electrical power for 3 days now. This was something that had already been warned some years back because of the lack of upkeep and repair of the system that was already old and not very well-kept when Socialism took over.
The fun part was the Government trying to pin their inefficiency on the CIA saying that it was a cyber attack. against the Guri Dam (the main source of electrical power in the country, shutting it down and then the failure cascading on the rest of the grid with the accompanying failures.
One retired engineer who worked on a damn said it was impossible because the equipment that still runs the dam is from when it was last upgraded in the early 80s. He said something along the lines of “trying to hack grandma’s old ice box.”
And then the other question pops: What kind of stupid government would connect the main source of electrical power of the country to the Internet so it could be faced with the threat of being hacked?
My prediction about the Somalia of Latin America is fast approaching.
“What kind of stupid government would connect the main source of electrical power of the country to the Internet so it could be faced with the threat of being hacked?”
Funny you should ask that…
Grid security and robustness in the US is a major concern, both from cyber but also from space weather phenomena. And let’s not talk about what will happen when too many people per block try to plug in their new electric vehicles. The hackability part, yeah, that’s a real issue but far from the only one.
It’s becoming increasingly common in order to allow load balancing from centralized nodes.
The power engineers work off an entirely different mindset and are only recently becoming aware of the security risks involved in SCADA interconnectivity. Look at the disasters the Ukrainians have had to deal with after Russia mucked about with their SCADA systems.
Yes, it seems that connecting system critical devices to the Internet is unfortunately common practice. It also seems to be common practice to construct such devices using Windows.