bugtraq - Re: Blaster / Power Outage Follow up

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Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2003 14:02:44 -0700
From: Nicholas Weaver <nweaver@...berkeley.edu>
To: "Richard M. Smith" <rms@...puterbytesman.com>
Cc: "'Geoff Shively'" <gshively@...x.com>, bugtraq@...urityfocus.com
Subject: Re: Blaster / Power Outage Follow up

On Thu, Sep 04, 2003 at 01:36:17PM -0400, Richard M. Smith composed:
> And here's more:
> 
> Blackout Probe Hears FirstEnergy Tapes
> http://tinyurl.com/m8q4
> 
> ...
> 
> The House committee released a transcript of telephone calls between
> FirstEnergy and the Midwest region's power grid operator which showed
> growing chaos and confusion in FirstEnergy's control room in the hours
> before the blackout. 
> 
> "We have no clue. OUR COMPUTER IS GIVING US FITS, TOO. We don't even
> know the status of some of the stuff around us," an operator at Akron,
> Ohio-based FirstEnergy said. 

This suggestst that claims of network disruption are spurious (Blaster
has very little network load, a side effect of bad design), rather
than operator CONTROL computers were directly infected, as Blaster
causes all sorts of weird side-effects (eg, Cut & paste, drag and
drop, and any control system using RPC stops working).

-- 
Nicholas C. Weaver                                 nweaver@...berkeley.edu