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Tuesday, October 15, 2019

Mainstream media took no notice. Or make that, gave no notice. No easy soundbite headlining probably quelled any will to report this -- "So far, I don't see any evidence that this was really targeted," said Reid Wightman, senior vulnerability analyst at industrial cybersecurity firm Dragos Inc. "This was probably just an automated bot that was scanning the internet for vulnerable devices, or some script kiddie," he said, using a term for an unskilled hacker. Nevertheless, the case turned heads at multiple federal agencies, collectively responsible for keeping the lights on in the face of an onslaught of cyber and physical threats. The blind spots would have left grid operators in the dark for five-minute spans — not enough time to risk power outages but still posing a setback to normal operations.

POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

The italicized part of the headlining is a run-together of two mid-item paragraphs from Sept. 6 reporting of release of a government report of a power grid event sequence "in the west" which happened March 5, and presumably went largely unreported to the public for half a year [source of the opening image; captioning added].

Grid passages through the Rockies are few and far between, so that alternate grid adaptations to normal/abnormal operation impacts are most difficult, through the Rockies. The item links to an online four-page government [NERC] document copy, itself dated Sept. 4, 2019. A "Lessons Learned" document. (Also linked, an April 30 item published online by the same reporting outlet.)

Tune time. Hat tip to a friend for forwarding info.