The 'cyber-attack' threat to London's Olympic ceremony

Re:The 'cyber-attack' threat to London's Olympic ceremony by _mulder_ on Monday July 08, 2013 @09:09AM (#6006541)

Yeh, good job Siemens don't make anything to do with power grids.

Oh no... http://www.energy.siemens.com/hq/en/power-transmission/ http://www.energy.siemens.com/hq/en/fossil-power-generation/ http://www.siemens.co.uk/en/news_press/index/news_archive/20...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The 'cyber-attack' threat to London's Olympic ceremony by arethuza on Monday July 08, 2013 @11:08AM (#6007119)

Yes, I am rather familiar with Siemens as a company.

What I meant was, how diverse are the control systems for national grids. If they are highly diverse then they are going to be more difficult to target, if they are all the same generation kit from the same vendor then the threat will be higher.

Which one is it?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The 'cyber-attack' threat to London's Olympic ceremony by xyzzy123 on Monday July 08, 2013 @02:57PM (#6008466)

In my limited experience (n = 6) I've not seen the same control system twice. I believe this is because the systems I looked at were built at quite different times. This probably varies a lot between countries.

So your point is valid, but diversity doesn't help if the overall resilience of the grid is so low that attacking a few carefully chosen targets could cause a massive blackout.

[ Parent | on HN ]