
Sniper attack on Utah substation highlights grid vulnerability - cossatot
http://www.utilitydive.com/news/sniper-attack-on-utah-substation-highlights-grid-vulnerability/428202/
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kogepathic
It will never be economically feasible to secure the grid from physical
attack.

It is too expensive to bury the distribution network, and while isolated
attacks like this are extremely unfortunate, the reality is that they are
infrequent enough that physically securing the equipment will cost more than
the economic losses to the energy company.

The state of industrial security is laughable, and electronic attacks are much
easier to accomplish than physical attacks, simply because you can target
geographically distributed locations simultaneously.

It's unfortunate that someone thought it was fun to shoot up some
transformers, but just look at the article: up to $1 million in costs for the
operator in this incident, versus an estimate of hundreds of billions in
damages due to a cyber attack.

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Eridrus
Preventative measures may be costly, but maybe we should have something like
shotspotter + video drones deployed so that these people can at least be
caught and hopefully it will act as a deterrent.

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LyndsySimon
That would be ineffective for a number of reasons - chief among them being
that shotspotter is largely ineffective, and that substations are often
located in rural areas where gunshots are both common and expected
occurrences.

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Eridrus
I had a little bit of a google for shotspotter effectiveness info.

It seems like it has a false positive problem (which you allude to) and a
response time problem.

The first problem seems almost irrelevant if the response cost is low (because
you have drones), the latter problem may be more of an issue. Recent drones
can get 45 mph, so depending on what kind of range you expect snipers to have,
it's probably possible to have a ring of them around the area such that their
2 min range only just overlaps and be able to cover ~3-4 miles around an
installation.

Is 2 minutes too slow of a response time for these facilities? I don't know.

Rural areas will be much easier to secure than urban areas though.

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teh_klev
Direct link to the Energy Wire article which this post is largely based on:

[http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060043920](http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060043920)

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dogma1138
Here is a simpler attack vector.

Steal a garbage truck, ram a substation.

You can't protect the grid form physical attacks.

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nradov
Actually a truck ramming would cause much less damage to most substations.
Usually they have decent fences and a bunch of steel and concrete structures
around the transformers which would make ramming pretty difficult.

The shooting attacks were so destructive because punching holes in
transformers allowed coolant to leak out, forcing those transformers to shut
down. Repairing such damage is a lengthy and expensive process. Substation
transformers are large, heavy, and complex; you can't fix the damage just by
slapping on a quick patch. And buying a replacement takes months.

~~~
LyndsySimon
A quick look through Google Maps leads me to believe that this is most likely
the substation where it happened:
[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Page,+AZ+86040/@37.1431342...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Page,+AZ+86040/@37.1431342,-112.0661026,438m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x8734135bfdcd758f:0x6e982f5153384e39!8m2!3d36.9147222!4d-111.4558333?hl=en)

There's no perimeter security there to speak of - just a chain-link fence, and
no bollards or anything else to keep someone from driving over it.

There are plenty of attack vectors available for this sort of thing, though.
I'm not sure it's even possible to effectively protect something like this.

