Sunday, April 19, 2009

Report: Cybercriminals have penetrated U.S. electrical grid

One of the most important military stratagies is that one must deny the enemy of their supplies and must protect their own supply lines.  For an enemy to infiltrate the supply line at the source is the ultimate in battle.  For an enemy to have the ability to shut down our own power grid is the ultimate coup to our very existance.

This report that has been released shows that cybercriminals from China, Russia and other countries have uploaded software to control systems within the Power Grid that could - when activated by the hacker - put America in the dark.  

Report: Cybercriminals have penetrated U.S. electrical grid

For the "how" of this, please read this associated article.

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Thursday, April 9, 2009

Why Me?




I know, it has been a couple months since I last posted and now I can say with confidence that I have shot my only New Year Resolution right in the arse. At least I admit it, but it is a bit on the difficult side when you are so busy at work. Not that I am complaining, but that I am just busy. 

Work has me working on a large huge gigantic gargantuan impressively ginormous alpine log home for a client.  At a whopping 15- to 17-thousand square feet (no one can give me an exact size) it is safe to say that this house is one of the largest that I have ever been in and is the largest I have ever worked on.  I have taken a few photos here and there and have posted them to my Flickr site.  More photos will be forthcoming.

Here on the homefront, we have been experiencing technical difficulties.  First, one of my computers has died a horrible death and the only fix is to replace the motherboard (main board).  My backup computer is two years older than my now dead main computer and is on it's last leg.  Thank God my laptop is still trudging along, because Lisi's computer went belly up a couple days ago and that laptop is somewhat keeping her on the internet.

Speaking of the internet, I found out some interesting information last night, pretty much the hard way.  I have always pulled up my website at least twice each day to make sure that it is still up and running in addition to painstakingly searching for any problems with it on a weekly basis.  Yesterday morning - before work - I looked at my site and all was well, as usual.  Last night was a different story, as you can see from the above photo.  Yes, dear reader, my site was hacked.  Once I discovered that, I pulled off my site and re-uploaded it from a backup copy.  I was not alone in my anquish though, because I was only one of over 100,000 of the sites that was hacked.  Fortunately, it was a breech on the actual server itself and did not allow access to my passwords or data other than to rename a lot of files.

The good that came out of the hacker attack is that I have started really taking a good look at some of the internals within my site as well as to look at a few sites that hackers use to find exploits and show off their dasterdly deeds.  By looking at these sites, I can keep an eye on possible issues within my own personal site as well as those that I code and see where I am going to have issues in the future.

So, this weekend we are helping some dear friends move and enjoying Easter with them.  I hope everyone has a great Easter Weekend.