Chinese crackers blamed for US power blackouts

Alien spaceships did it

The report into the outage said it was the failure to trim trees under the powerlines, they didn't trim the trees, the power lines were under heavy load running aircon in hot weather, got hot, sagged, touched the trees and bingo, line failure plus cascade failure since the network was at capacity and there wasn't enough slack in the system for the other transmission lines to take up the load.

The solution recommended was to invest in more power stations (slack capacity to cover the high load states), and keep the trees under the power lines trimmed so they don't short the cables.

But I, Steve Spaucerman, specialist in all things alien, know it was the saucermen of Tau Seti. Their saucers create an ionizing field around them, that's how their zytron drive works. That ionizing field shorted out our power circuits and crippled our national infrastructure.

It was a test I tell you, they're testing our infrastructure in preparation for an invasion!

Fortunately, with my knowledge of their technology, I can help you defend against these alien attacks and look, I got the 'National Journal Magazine' to run a story so it must be true!

As someone famous famously said,

"Pull the other one; it's got bells on it."

And wtf is up with that bloody survey popup? How many times am I supposed to fill it in?

Motive?

Your sub heading seems to suggest that the motive behind the blackout was the removal of firewalls, but surely a) if they can cause a power station to go off line they are accomplished enough to get through a mere firewall b) if the firewall goes down (ie, is not on a UPS) then the machine it protects goes down too.

No, no, it was us, I admit it.

Within minutes of the lights coming back on, NYC mayor Bloomberg had himself a press conference in which he blamed the entire incident on Canada. I don't recall any retractions or apologies when the trees were made to shoulder the blame, so I'm here to go on record to say yes, it was us. In fact it was me. A conspiracy of vast proportions gone horribly awry, that left me stuck in a hospital elevator for half an hour until the emergency power was brought online. After that I took the stairs when visiting me mum and rethought the whole "take down the eastern seaboard and chunks of the midwest" strategy. I'm really very sorry.

@Julian cox

I'd always understood cracker = harware, hacker = software (as well as the more usual usage of 'oh, i just hacked it together' code monkey speak )(as i am one, i think i'm allowed to call it)

Chinese whispers

Thats why its been kept hush hush so far...

"And wtf is up with that bloody survey popup? How many times am I supposed to fill it in?" - FireFox with NoScript = none ;)

You what?

Chinese white people shut off our leccy? Typical, now even Al Quaeda are contracting out to Asia..

@Hacker versus cracker

A hacker is someone who writes a bit of a code that is unusual and perhaps opens up a new field in IT, or is thrown in as a quick fix.

A hacker knows their systems so well they can hack in a solution fast, then comeback later to do it properly.

A hack is a bit of code that is particularly, clever but is not orthodox.

Perl for example is a hacked together language created by a hacker. And is full of hacks. Speed to stdout is faster than basic orthodox compiled C code, that is because of hacking. Perl is also finding it very hard to release a new version, and that is also because of all the hacks in it.

A cracker is someone who cracks into software, being on a network, harddrive, main memory is immaterial.

Cracking is the art of exploiting software.

Hacking is the art of creating new ideas and using the technology in innovative ways.

Now cracking is hacking, if and only if the person doing the cracking is doing it in a new innovative way, or perhaps doing it on the fly. But they are still cracking, they are distinct descriptors.

A DDoS attack nowadays, is a crack, but when it was found it was a hack. If it was used to cause instability then it was a crack, but if it was tested in controlled environment then it was a hack.

Cracking is breaking into secured software, so breaking the authentication mechanisms, or exploiting a bug, to cause the system to crash, or to give access where the design did not allow.

Whereas a hack may use a bug to keep a system stable.

Of course there is a grey area, but in practice it is quite obvious when cracking or hacking is occurring. But, grey areas such as using a worm to patch systems, generally fall into the realm of a crack, because you don't have authority to alter the state of other people's machines, and it may cause instability, but if you were to pull it off with no one negatively effected, that would be considered a hack. And a security company that notices some small signature may patch in a quick hack to the scanner perhaps, and then redo later.

And the hairy linux programmer idea, may also annoy those in the BSD camp, who claimed the hacker name a long time ago.

It is not so much an ethical thing really, but that is where people get annoyed, it is more to do with the intention and the action.

And I applaud El Reg for doing their bit, in using the correct terminology.

Hacks can become patterns

If a hack is found to be valid, then it is moved up to a pattern, but that normally requires quite a rigorous hack in the first place, and only a few manage to move up the chain.

And a lot of patterns are based off hacks that have been refined.

I noticed the word hacker in the main article as well, but it may very well be valid.

The headline is cracker because that is what has happened. But, getting into the power system probably required some hacking skills along the line. It would be unfair to put hacker in the headline, but the article will probably include it. If the exploit was well known, then no hacking skills required apart from the ability to run a script and change some configs. But, in this instance they probably used some new exploits, well at least found something new in the system to attack.

Untrimmed trees- hah!

"the failure to trim trees under the powerlines, they didn't trim the trees, the power lines were under heavy load running aircon..."

Yes, but the aircon was cooling Google servers being accessed by Chinese hackers, so it is still the Chinese hackers' faults!

See! Still their fault.

far fetched fantasy

another non factual guessing game with his own prejudice. may as well claim they are hacking me too,, because there is a list of chinese origin in my firewall log....I'll ignore the fact that it is coinciding with ports of infected machines and game servers, but hey, they are out to get us...

@Julian Cox

Let me guess - you're one of those guys who uses 'gibibytes'...

@David Wiernicki

WTF is a 'gibibytes'?

Chinese crackers hack gibibytes to take down the WOPR

First, I agree with Julian. While it is obvious from this thread that people have different ideas of what hackers and crackers are, I still remember a time when the terms were not used interchangeably. A time when the term hacker was something to be proud of, not something that caused suspicion.

Second, don't we have enough problems without resorting to useless speculation? We're at war (officially or unofficially, take your pick) with Iraq and Afghanistan, and probably Iran as well. We've got North Korea we still feel we need to keep an eye on. We'll always keep our eyes on Cuba (the reasons for which the government never says). And now we want to fuel speculation and conspiracy theories to create a rift between us and China. Are we actively seeking Cold War II? I know China is communist, and it's probably the only communist country we're accepting of (gee, I wonder why that could be), but do we really want another Cold War? I imagine we, the citizens, don't. Not that that ever stopped the government from doing anything.

Third, I find it very telling that the government actually has a "counterintelligence" department or agency. Sadly, I think we can safely take that term at face value.

Lastly, while I personally don't like the terms kibi-, mebi-, and gibibytes, their existence does make sense when you consider kilo, mega, and giga are scientific prefixes with defined values. Just because the computer industry changed their values when referring to bits and bytes didn't make it a good idea, and didn't make it right. How would people react if the definition of liter/litre was different depending on whether you were measuring water or gasoline? What if the definition of gram was different depending on whether you were measuring chocolate or explosives? Standards are good. They're even better when specific industries don't hijack their definitions.

National Liberation Army

The fact that it is the People's Liberation Army and not the National really leads me to believe this article is pure junk.

If the researcher can't even get that right what about the rest of it?

Thanks.

Brian

Inside sauce told me...

... it was the Fortune Cookies, and not the Chinese crackers...