MuckRock
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2021–2024
1:14 · 100K views · Nov 9, 2016
Footage of the 2007 Aurora test, in which a cyberattack was used to destroy a large generator at a test facility in Idaho.
HN cites it as proof that cyberattacks can physically destroy power grid equipment.
3 comments from Hacker News
> It’s also possible that the manufacturer gets hacked, and subsequently sends out attacker controlled and wrong software updates to the inverters, with possibly dire consequences. Idaho National Lab is one of those places that researches this. [LINK] - their domains are energy (primarily nuclear and integrated) and national security ... and securing the grid is the intersection of that. And some time back... [LINK] ( [LINK] ) . The story is from 2020. The event is from 2007. The test footage linked in the article is on YouTube - this video The wikipedia article on the test: [LINK] From the wired article the key part of how it broke: > A protective relay attached to that generator was designed to prevent it from connecting to the rest of the power system without first syncing to that exact rhythm: 60 hertz. But Assante’s hacker in Idaho Falls had just reprogrammed that safeguard device, flipping its logic on its head. > At 11:33 am and 23 seconds, the protective relay observed that the generator was perfectly synced. But then its corrupted brain did the opposite of what it was meant to do: It opened a circuit breaker to disconnect the machine. > When the generator was detached from the larger circuit of Idaho National Laboratory’s electrical grid and relieved of the burden of sharing its energy with that vast system, it instantly began to accelerate, spinning faster, like a pack of horses that had been let loose from its carriage. As soon as the protective relay observed that th
Someone tested such a thing on a pretty big generator: this video [LINK] > Black chunks began to fly out of an access panel on the generator, which the researchers had left open to watch its internals. Inside, the black rubber grommet that linked the two halves of the generator’s shaft was tearing itself apart. This was a proof-of-concept for a cyber attack on power infrastructure. They sent it malware that inverted the grid sync behavior from "Sync up, then connect, and if you de-sync, disconnect" to "If you are synced, disconnect, if you are desynced, reconnect" The Wired article is an advert for a book filled with pretty fluffy prose - At times reading like a romance novel...
> would be possible only because some modern equipment is used and connected to the network [...] containing the sync-checks "How 30 Lines of Code Blew Up a 27-Ton Generator: A secret experiment in 2007 proved that hackers could devastate power grid equipment beyond repair—with a file no bigger than a gif": [LINK] YouTube video of demonstration: this video