The story of Chinese hackers being responsible for the 2003 Northeast blackout in the U.S. has been making the rounds in the Intertubes. This ridiculous story has been run by several respected news organizations, pushed by the US government, and has generally been circulated much more than it deserves. Even the normally cynical and skeptical Josh blogged about this story in a seemingly sincere and non-sarcastic way (I could be wrong, though).
Just for a little fairness and balance, here's a reality check from Wired:
Chinese hackers may have been responsible for the recent power outage in Florida, and the widespread blackout that struck the northeastern U.S. in 2003, according to a new report in the National Journal that shows the intelligence community taking cyberwar hysteria to new and dizzying heights.
The story, citing computer security professionals, who in turn cite unnamed U.S. intelligence officials, says that China's People's Liberation Army may have cracked the computers controlling the U.S. power grid to trigger the cascading 2003 blackout that cut off electricity to 50 million people in eight states and a Canadian province.
"Investigators blamed 'overgrown trees' that came into contact with strained high-voltage lines near facilities in Ohio owned by FirstEnergy Corp.," the story reads. "There has never been an official U.S. government assertion of Chinese involvement in the outage, but intelligence and other government officials contacted for this story did not explicitly rule out a Chinese role. One security analyst in the private sector with close ties to the intelligence community said that some senior intelligence officials believe that China played a role in the 2003 blackout that is still not fully understood."
It's official: Cyberterror is the new yellowcake uranium.
Ever since intelligence chief Michael McConnell decided on cyberterrorism as the latest raison d'etre for warrantless NSA surveillance, we've seen increasingly brazen falsehoods and unverifiable cyberattack stories coming from him and his subordinates, from McConnell's bogus claim that cyberattacks cost the U.S. economy $100 billion a year, to one intelligence official's vague assertion that hackers have caused electrical blackouts in unnamed countries overseas.
This time, though, they've attached their tale to the most thoroughly investigated power incident in U.S. history.
The official investigation into the February outage in Florida is ongoing, so I'll be watching with eager eyes for signs of Chinese hackers when the final report comes out. But there's no need to wait to evaluate the claim that hackers caused the northeastern blackout of 2003. The North American Electric Reliability Council spent six months investigating the outage.
The detailed 228-page final NERC report found a complex confluence of events responsible, but not a single hacker. It traced the root cause of the outage to the utility company FirstEnergy's failure to trim back trees encroaching on high-voltage power lines in Ohio. When the power lines were ensnared by the trees, they tripped.