Massive Brazil blackout triggers crime alert

Massive Brazil blackout triggers crime alert

news.yahoo.com

A massive blackout across the southern half of Brazil has plunged tens of millions of people into darkness and prompted a major police mobilization amid fears of an opportunistic crime wave.

The country's largest cities, including Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro among others, were left with no illumination or traffic lights due to the outage late Tuesday, which the energy ministry said was caused by an undetermined problem at the country's biggest hydroelectric plant, Itaipu, on the border with Paraguay.

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I was just watching a 60 minutes the other night where they were discussing major government bodies hacking and attacking eachother's power grids. Is this cyber terrorism?

I can't imagine what would happen if the lights went out and stayed out here in NYC. I know Brasil is crowded too. I hope this is nothing serious.

Olympics?

news.yahoo.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Holy cow! They think that 50 million people are without power. GEEZ!

I hope they get this fixed and soon!

Wow, this is a huge deal!

Of course I am suspicious of nearly everything and try to tie it back to the American Government. So, I wonder if we'll see a push for internet security due to this crisis.

And make no mistake, this is a crisis.

I hope it is something simple that can be resolved with the "flick of a switch" so to say, but if it lingers for any amount of time as something serious, it is definately something to keep an eye on.

I read another report that said they were getting power back up. Hopefully none of the major reactors or generators were damaged otherwise you are looking at months not days.

reply to post by TruthWithin


Lets hope so. Sometimes I think that movies go a little too far in the way of making a plotline realistic. You know, as in giving the "bad guy" clues in how to make life hell.

Live Free or Die Hard is one such movie, IMO.

I mean, they all but give a roadmap for those who want to create serious havoc on a worldwide stage in that movie.

1st amendment and all.

Here is an interesting suggestion.



This piece ran just the day before these blackouts, on Sunday.

If the US is not now prepared for such an attack, what are the chances Brazil is now??? Plus, it's already happened to Brazil before.

The energy has already been restored on all parts of Brazil.
And yes, that's has already happened here before. Three times.

And the most funny thing is that on Oct. 30, Dilma Rousseff (one of the presidential candidates for the next election) said that Brazil didn't have to worry because the govt. did a lot of investments on the energy infrastructure and another blackout was out of question.

And the worst part in this blackout: i was stuck inside an elevador for almost 2 hours.

A massive 2007 electrical blackout in Brazil has been newly blamed on computer hackers, but was actually the result of a utility company’s negligent maintenance of high voltage insulators on two transmission lines. That’s according to reports from government regulators and others who investigated the incident for more than a year.

In a broadcast Sunday night, the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes cited unnamed sources in making the extraordinary claim that a two-day outage in the Atlantic state of Espirito Santo was triggered by hackers targeting a utility company’s control systems. The blackout affected 3 million people. Hackers also caused another, smaller blackout north of Rio de Janeiro in January 2005, the network claimed.

Brazilian government officials disputed the report over the weekend, and Raphael Mandarino Jr., director of the Homeland Security Information and Communication Directorate, told the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo that he’s investigated the claims and found no evidence of hacker attacks, adding that Brazil’s electric control systems are not directly connected to the internet.

Nothing to see here, just lame fear tactics. I watched the 60 minutes episode and there were a lot of unanswered questions I felt. Most critical systems do not have direct Internet access, sure there may be out of band management of sorts but not the idiotic "Die Hard" plug in my mac and take down cities mentality.

I think the grids are more a threat to themselves given poor infrastructure and outdated, overloaded equipment. And that's a US perspective, god only knows how out of date grid system in Brazil are.

src

brill