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Cyber Risks · Krebs on Security

Cable: No Cyber Attack in Brazilian ’09 Blackout

Summary: A classified U.S. embassy cable published by WikiLeaks attributes Brazil's November 2009 blackout, which cut power to 18 of 27 states and up to 60 million people for 20 minutes to six hours, to a confluence of independent factors rather than cyber sabotage. Executives from Brazil's National Operator of the Interconnected Power System told the embassy the system was a closed network on its own wires above the electricity lines, required a voice command to disrupt transmission, and that short circuits within milliseconds disabled all three lines feeding Sao Paulo before their ten-second recovery times elapsed.

What's compelling: The cable's own conclusion is that although the outage did not appear to be an attack, such an event is possible, and it recommends using the incident to push a military-to-military CISMOA agreement and a cybersecurity working group. The documented cause was capacity: the system was already running with two lines down when the incident took out all three.

Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗

Topics
Data Breaches
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