"Officials have stopped short of calling it an act of terrorism, presumably because we don’t know the motive of whoever perpetrated the act"
There was another one elsewhere [Washington state [1]] and they found out the perps did it to facilitate knocking over some business of some sort. So, just because it quacks like a duck does not mean it either walks like a duck nor end ends up being a duck.
There have also been attacks in Utah by so called environmentalists[2] in an attempt to blunt or "protest" the use of fossil fuels in producing electricity.
But, you know, people like narratives which match their ideology a whole lot.
I really don’t understand this thread…many times on HN, you’ll hear things like Occam’s Razor (follow the simplest explanation), cite official sources, etc.
Here, we have an official report from the prosecutor stating that people attacked substations in furtherance of theft but a lot of people are trying to pin it as part of a larger conspiracy against the government.
Like we should tell conspiracy theorists, the burden is on you to cite the evidence confirming your alleged conspiracy. In absence of that evidence, is it not better to go with the word of the DA, whose job is literally to investigate and gather facts about cases like this?
Regarding the sabotage in Washington State, it doesn't make a lot of sense to attack four substations simultaneously just to steal from the cash register of a small business.
If I fancied myself to be an antigovernment militia leader who had read all the white supremacist literature from the last 40 years that repeatedly describes attacking critical infrastructure like pipelines, telecoms and electricity pylons and substations to create chaos and ignite the race war, I'd definitely teach my inexperienced acolytes to add a little petty theft to their sabotage to avoid a terrorism enhancement when they're caught probing the defenses and response times of utilities and law enforcement.
Prior to Greenwood & Crahan's attack on the substation in WA on Dec 25, in the weeks prior there were also >=6 other substation attacks in WA and OR. As far as I can tell, nobody's been caught in any of the earlier attacks, and they don't seem to have been tied to any burglaries: https://www.opb.org/article/2022/12/08/string-of-electrical-...
In your second link, the article specifically states "McRae probably wasn’t acting as an ecosaboteur."
I don't know how you read that and came to the conclusion that "attacks by so called environmentalists" when the article comes to the opposite conclusion.
https://archive.ph/hrZar
"In 1995, Damron was an electrical engineering student at North Dakota State University when he cut through 19 underground phone cables to disable an alarm at Site on Sound in Fargo. He then stole $80,000 in equipment from the car-stereo business. FBI agents captured him in 1996 in an Iowa hotel room after a two-year manhunt"
I live not too far from the area. There was a lot of pressure to call it terrorism early on because this just happened to coincide with a drag show happening in the effected area that Proud Boy members and locals tried to prevent from happening via threats, and a month prior they were harassing people at another drag show in another nearby city. So whether these same people attacked the substations to prevent the drag show from happening is just speculation, they were absolutely terrorizing some people in some way and so far it's the only lead I know of.
There were also three men who attacked a power station and were actually were committing an act of terrorism.[1]
Those three got the idea from the government itself.[2] Which, given the nature of our supply chains, are understandably aware of the vulnerability.
Some people see all narratives as an opportunity to whip up fear, when given the facts, they could more charitably be seen as an opportunity to whip up awareness. Regardless of your ideology, it might be prudent.
It's quite interesting that they also attacked a substation that looked important on a map, but wasn't actually vital. I think some of the early reporting about this incident suggested they "knew what they were doing", but the apparent misidentification of one of their targets perhaps suggests the perpetrators were making educated guesses, without detailed/insider knowledge of how the system worked.
They knew enough to shoot a part that is filled with fluid and hard to replace.
They might have lacked the knowledge of "the grid" to make such an attack go beyond one county, but there was some degree of thought put into that attack.
If we are wildly speculating, it's possible that those other targets could have had compatible Hardware. Alternatively, they could have been looking to disable power to something off the secondary branch and hit both for redundancy
1. I think we are speculating about intention here. Maybe they were both incorrectly identified as connected to the larger grid. Maybe the smaller one was chosen as a second target for a different reason.
2. Nothing discussed in the video is insider knowledge. Everything is public knowledge, and could have been learned with a library card and an internet connection.
I bet they used the wrong maps. Like a topo or regular driving map. If they'd gone that one step further and gotten the utility GIS layers Tthings could have gotten a lot more out of hand.
This has happened before, in 2013, near San Jose, CA.[1] Utilities were supposed to upgrade security by building concrete walls around major transformers. There aren't that many of them. Did that happen?
There's actually a comment about this on the YouTube video—it seems like upgrades happened extensively throughout California, including concrete walls, armed patrols and automated gunshot locators, but not in other states.
Motivations aside, this alongside the weather-induced trouble seen in Texas makes it seem like a really good idea to start putting into place some decentralization… the impact of a substation or other infrastructure being out is reduced considerably when a decent percentage of the buildings on the grid have solar panels and batteries to fall back on.
If people really understood just how fragile the electric grid is they would soil themselves. If anything it's amazing that it works as well as it does - a real testament to all those that keep it up and operational. However, as you point out, continually running on the ragged edge is not a wise long term strategy.
It's interesting to try to game out who might be motivated to commit to an attack like this, at the (small compared to the state or country) scale it was at.
I think we can rule out any kind of state actor, even if they were acting through a proxy. The risk/reward just isn't there, and this is not a hard attack to plan, so there's no point in carrying out a "test". If the goal were to send a message, well, this just isn't going to cut it. The US military will crush you regardless of the status of a power substation in North Carolina.
However, it could easily have been done by someone with a political agenda in favor of a state actor but not in any way endorsed by them, or by someone with a general political motive. Here's the catch with that: For such a person, there is no point to doing this unless you later claim responsibility and gain notoriety. If your goal is ideological, you'd use the chaos you created to try to spread your ideology. If your goal is to have your demands heard, well, you'd have to make those demands first. (Of course, it could be the attackers meant to do that but chickened out when they saw what an overwhelming response this provoked, or something).
It's possible somebody did it by accident or because they are mentally unstable and their dog told them to, etc. Can never discount that. However, I think the most likely explanation is actually that this is a criminal act that was done with some only proximately related goal in mind - blackmailing an energy executive? Stealing something of value from somewhere in the area of attack? Distract authorities while conducting some other illicit behavior somewhere - like a break-in to some other piece of infrastructure - for whatever reason?
Hopefully we find out someday. (And I mean, hopefully we stop this stuff from happening, but that is gonna take some doing.)
If the attacker's ultimate goal is ideological but their proximate goal is chaos and they think they have a large enough group of similarly motivated people the purpose could be quite simply to show that it can be done. Do it, don't get caught, and wait for the copycats. It doesn't even matter if their ultimate goals and the original attacker's align.
> If the goal were to send a message, well, this just isn't going to cut it. The US military will crush you regardless of the status of a power substation in North Carolina.
Like they crushed Iraq for 9/11?
Finding and crushing someone is easy, finding an actually guilty party that cannot be found is not so easy.
Who knows what this is, but some people can see the strategic significance of it.
I think we are being probed. And what it took to restore service is not encouraging if someone motivated decided to have multiple people simultaneously target infrastructure across a wide number of targets. Especially if we happened to be, say, in the middle of a trade war.
Shipping all our manufacturing overseas was beyond stupid.
It's bonkers (and infuriating) to me that domestic terrorists launched an attack on their own home soil and it wasn't front page news everywhere the next day.
Three Men Plead Guilty to Conspiring to Provide Material Support to a Plot to Attack Power Grids in the United States
Domestic Terrorism Plot was in Furtherance of White Supremacist Ideology
Sure, we don’t know about this particular attack, but we know that white supremacist groups have already been committing such crimes and have had longstanding, well-documented and widely-publicized plans to do so.
It's far-right accelerationism. There are those who think "the west has fallen" and the only thing to do now is hasten the collapse of that society so they can build a new one(where they think they'll be on top, for some reason). Google "boogaloo boys" for threads to pull on if you want to learn more.
Last para is pretty relevant: "But it’s important to put this event in context as well. Attacks on the power grid are relatively rare, and they fall pretty low on the list of threats, even behind cybersecurity and supply chain issues. The number one threat to the grid in nearly every place in the US? The weather. If you experience an outage of any length, it's many times more likely to be mother nature than a bad actor with a gun"
They're rare because nobody is doing them. If some group decides that it's a thing to do, it will increase rapidly in frequency.
I don't know what the limitations are, and maybe natural disasters will continue to dominate. But I wouldn't extrapolate just because it hadn't been the mechanism of choice so far.
I actually don't think that's terribly relevant. Deliberate attacks are qualitatively different from natural events. They're not independent, so naive statistical comparisons are misleading. In particular, deliberate attacks have a significant social component, where the success of one attack, especially one that is widely known, can lead to more being attempted. Attackers can adapt to your countermeasures. There also seem to be an increasing number of people willing to destroy critical bits of society.
In short, past rates are not a guarantee of future risks. I expect infrastructure attacks to be a growing problem.
Knowing the area, I would put "Drunk rednecks" as the most likely cause. Followed by "So they'd have an excuse for not going to work or have to make a court date."
Domestic terrorism or a "Die Hard" scenario is at the bottom of my list. It's a rural county - there's hardly any shock value to doing this (vs. a bigger city like Raleigh or Charlotte) that a terrorist would want.
I watched the video with great interest, then immediately downloaded a copy from YouTube when I first saw it, because I was sure it wasn't going to be around later in the day to show my friend. I assumed it would get struck by YouTube, but here we are.
This lead me to realize that I'm now habituated to an environment where telling the truth seems like a forbidden act.
Not quite what the video is about. The $75k is for finding the persons which facilitates finding the motive (which, to be fair, is what more people will be interested in), not the 'what happened' with technical content (which is more of an HN type of interest). The video answers the question in the title.
"As a string of attacks on electrical substations unfolded in Oregon and Washington in 2022, the FBI was warning utilities of white supremacists’ plots to take down the nation’s power grid"
"The individuals of concern believe that an attack on electrical infrastructure will contribute to their ideological goal of causing societal collapse and a subsequent race war in the United States,” according to an FBI memo obtained by OPB and KUOW.
—-
This has been going on for some time. This is not a bunch of environmentalists as some people have oddly assumed in this thread. This is part of a long pattern of right-wing political violence in the US that is occurring throughout the country, not just in North Carolina. Virtually every week, there’s an arrest of a right wing political group, candidate, or activist who is waging a campaign of violence against the American public. Blaming so-called "environmentalists" for what is clearly a repeated pattern of right wing political violence is about as tone deaf as you can get. Read the news.
Let's say that someone (perhaps DoE) identified that the power grid was at risk of attack. Convincing a bunch of people (politicians) to spend a chunk of change to secure it would be betweeen difficult and impossible. In order to further their cause, they can stage these trivial looking attacks to attract funding to grid security.
In computers, hiring pen testers is a common way to get security funded. An attack is a sure fire way to get something funded.
> Convincing a bunch of people (politicians) to spend a chunk of change to secure it would be betweeen difficult and impossible.
I'm not convinced of this. They play a lot of games, but ensuring that power is reliable and fairly price-stable is not just important to all of the peasant middle class voters, but also to their big corporate donors, the farming blocks, etc.
I think it's interesting Russia isn't doing more things like this in protest of Ukraine support, whether this was them or not. Realistically, two teams of 5 guys with good opsec training could probably take out any infrastructure they wanted, and do it repeatedly
Nothing and expect these types of attack to continue.
Our infrastructure was built when America was a homogenous, high trust society. Those days are long gone. The only way to defend against this are concrete barriers surrounding each and every substation .
[+] [-] mc32|3 years ago|reply
There was another one elsewhere [Washington state [1]] and they found out the perps did it to facilitate knocking over some business of some sort. So, just because it quacks like a duck does not mean it either walks like a duck nor end ends up being a duck.
There have also been attacks in Utah by so called environmentalists[2] in an attempt to blunt or "protest" the use of fossil fuels in producing electricity.
But, you know, people like narratives which match their ideology a whole lot.
[1]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/matthew-greenwood-jeremy-crahan...
[2]https://stopfossilfuels.org/electric-grid/shooting-transform...
[+] [-] boeingUH60|3 years ago|reply
Here, we have an official report from the prosecutor stating that people attacked substations in furtherance of theft but a lot of people are trying to pin it as part of a larger conspiracy against the government.
Like we should tell conspiracy theorists, the burden is on you to cite the evidence confirming your alleged conspiracy. In absence of that evidence, is it not better to go with the word of the DA, whose job is literally to investigate and gather facts about cases like this?
[+] [-] panarky|3 years ago|reply
If I fancied myself to be an antigovernment militia leader who had read all the white supremacist literature from the last 40 years that repeatedly describes attacking critical infrastructure like pipelines, telecoms and electricity pylons and substations to create chaos and ignite the race war, I'd definitely teach my inexperienced acolytes to add a little petty theft to their sabotage to avoid a terrorism enhancement when they're caught probing the defenses and response times of utilities and law enforcement.
[+] [-] neuronexmachina|3 years ago|reply
For reference, Greenwood & Crahan's indictment: https://www.justice.gov/media/1266956/dl?inline
[+] [-] Helithumper|3 years ago|reply
I don't know how you read that and came to the conclusion that "attacks by so called environmentalists" when the article comes to the opposite conclusion.
[+] [-] zoklet-enjoyer|3 years ago|reply
https://archive.ph/hrZar "In 1995, Damron was an electrical engineering student at North Dakota State University when he cut through 19 underground phone cables to disable an alarm at Site on Sound in Fargo. He then stole $80,000 in equipment from the car-stereo business. FBI agents captured him in 1996 in an Iowa hotel room after a two-year manhunt"
https://apnews.com/article/587580cb8aa145afbf59e535b5214234 Over 24,000 people without phone service so he could rob a stereo store
[+] [-] shagmin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akira2501|3 years ago|reply
Those three got the idea from the government itself.[2] Which, given the nature of our supply chains, are understandably aware of the vulnerability.
Some people see all narratives as an opportunity to whip up fear, when given the facts, they could more charitably be seen as an opportunity to whip up awareness. Regardless of your ideology, it might be prudent.
[1]: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/three-men-plead-guilty-conspi...
[2]: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/04/f15/LPTStudy...
[+] [-] LarryMullins|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geepound|3 years ago|reply
They might have lacked the knowledge of "the grid" to make such an attack go beyond one county, but there was some degree of thought put into that attack.
It's easier to attack than defend.
[+] [-] s1artibartfast|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] htag|3 years ago|reply
2. Nothing discussed in the video is insider knowledge. Everything is public knowledge, and could have been learned with a library card and an internet connection.
[+] [-] gonzo41|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CompleteWalker|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
[+] [-] jefftk|3 years ago|reply
(And that ignores that there are likely lots of other points of infrastructure that are similarly vulnerable.)
[+] [-] nightpool|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hellion|3 years ago|reply
This is something on the national scale with lots of federal internal attention - reports likely even having hit the potus desk.
I doubt we’ll hear much about this again unless there’s an arrest.
[+] [-] plsksosl|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kitsunesoba|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EricE|3 years ago|reply
If people really understood just how fragile the electric grid is they would soil themselves. If anything it's amazing that it works as well as it does - a real testament to all those that keep it up and operational. However, as you point out, continually running on the ragged edge is not a wise long term strategy.
[+] [-] ivraatiems|3 years ago|reply
I think we can rule out any kind of state actor, even if they were acting through a proxy. The risk/reward just isn't there, and this is not a hard attack to plan, so there's no point in carrying out a "test". If the goal were to send a message, well, this just isn't going to cut it. The US military will crush you regardless of the status of a power substation in North Carolina.
However, it could easily have been done by someone with a political agenda in favor of a state actor but not in any way endorsed by them, or by someone with a general political motive. Here's the catch with that: For such a person, there is no point to doing this unless you later claim responsibility and gain notoriety. If your goal is ideological, you'd use the chaos you created to try to spread your ideology. If your goal is to have your demands heard, well, you'd have to make those demands first. (Of course, it could be the attackers meant to do that but chickened out when they saw what an overwhelming response this provoked, or something).
It's possible somebody did it by accident or because they are mentally unstable and their dog told them to, etc. Can never discount that. However, I think the most likely explanation is actually that this is a criminal act that was done with some only proximately related goal in mind - blackmailing an energy executive? Stealing something of value from somewhere in the area of attack? Distract authorities while conducting some other illicit behavior somewhere - like a break-in to some other piece of infrastructure - for whatever reason?
Hopefully we find out someday. (And I mean, hopefully we stop this stuff from happening, but that is gonna take some doing.)
[+] [-] InspiredIdiot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistermann|3 years ago|reply
Like they crushed Iraq for 9/11?
Finding and crushing someone is easy, finding an actually guilty party that cannot be found is not so easy.
Who knows what this is, but some people can see the strategic significance of it.
[+] [-] EricE|3 years ago|reply
Shipping all our manufacturing overseas was beyond stupid.
[+] [-] boomboomsubban|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JasonFruit|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbigelow76|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrtesthah|3 years ago|reply
https://www.fpri.org/article/2020/04/the-growing-threat-pose...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/three-men-plead-guilty-conspi...
Three Men Plead Guilty to Conspiring to Provide Material Support to a Plot to Attack Power Grids in the United States
Domestic Terrorism Plot was in Furtherance of White Supremacist Ideology
Sure, we don’t know about this particular attack, but we know that white supremacist groups have already been committing such crimes and have had longstanding, well-documented and widely-publicized plans to do so.
[+] [-] knowaveragejoe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NavinF|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfengel|3 years ago|reply
I don't know what the limitations are, and maybe natural disasters will continue to dominate. But I wouldn't extrapolate just because it hadn't been the mechanism of choice so far.
[+] [-] andrewflnr|3 years ago|reply
In short, past rates are not a guarantee of future risks. I expect infrastructure attacks to be a growing problem.
[+] [-] chiph|3 years ago|reply
Domestic terrorism or a "Die Hard" scenario is at the bottom of my list. It's a rural county - there's hardly any shock value to doing this (vs. a bigger city like Raleigh or Charlotte) that a terrorist would want.
[+] [-] mikewarot|3 years ago|reply
This lead me to realize that I'm now habituated to an environment where telling the truth seems like a forbidden act.
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucb1e|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|3 years ago|reply
These folks disagree: https://cybersquirrel1.com
[+] [-] baby|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] XorNot|3 years ago|reply
For substations these are rare, for computers these are common.
[+] [-] sammalloy|3 years ago|reply
https://www.opb.org/article/2023/01/19/surge-in-oregon-washi...
"As a string of attacks on electrical substations unfolded in Oregon and Washington in 2022, the FBI was warning utilities of white supremacists’ plots to take down the nation’s power grid"
"The individuals of concern believe that an attack on electrical infrastructure will contribute to their ideological goal of causing societal collapse and a subsequent race war in the United States,” according to an FBI memo obtained by OPB and KUOW.
—-
This has been going on for some time. This is not a bunch of environmentalists as some people have oddly assumed in this thread. This is part of a long pattern of right-wing political violence in the US that is occurring throughout the country, not just in North Carolina. Virtually every week, there’s an arrest of a right wing political group, candidate, or activist who is waging a campaign of violence against the American public. Blaming so-called "environmentalists" for what is clearly a repeated pattern of right wing political violence is about as tone deaf as you can get. Read the news.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sargun|3 years ago|reply
Let's say that someone (perhaps DoE) identified that the power grid was at risk of attack. Convincing a bunch of people (politicians) to spend a chunk of change to secure it would be betweeen difficult and impossible. In order to further their cause, they can stage these trivial looking attacks to attract funding to grid security.
In computers, hiring pen testers is a common way to get security funded. An attack is a sure fire way to get something funded.
[+] [-] judge2020|3 years ago|reply
I'm not convinced of this. They play a lot of games, but ensuring that power is reliable and fairly price-stable is not just important to all of the peasant middle class voters, but also to their big corporate donors, the farming blocks, etc.
[+] [-] fckgnad|3 years ago|reply
That's like shooting up a school to get more security around schools. Come on.
[+] [-] ck2|3 years ago|reply
The annual TEN BILLION dollar TSA was created in response to a one-off foreign terror and they do their job horribly based on all the failed testing
What's being spent on the power grid security?
How many hours, forget days, are people willing to live without power?
[+] [-] thatguy0900|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1letterunixname|3 years ago|reply
The 60 Minutes' report mentioned the first known incident occurred in Morgan Hill, CA.
Same setup as Morgan Hill had: chain-linked fence instead of a high solid wall. I used to bicycle around that area when I was a kid.
[+] [-] freitzkriesler|3 years ago|reply
Our infrastructure was built when America was a homogenous, high trust society. Those days are long gone. The only way to defend against this are concrete barriers surrounding each and every substation .