• Category Archives Computers

  • Imagine a life with no computers……ahhhh……bliss…..

  • Electricity grid hacked – again

    Posted on by beno Comment

    Due to a lack of time, I did not blog about what seemed to be the world’s first recorded case of a computer breach taking down a sizable chunk of an electricity grid.
    So, here there is a case of the second hack. Nothing went black (according to the report), but the grid was/is out of control.

    http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/01/israels-electric-grid-hit-by-severe-hack-attack/

    Israel’s Electricity Authority experienced a serious hack attack that officials are still working to repel, the country’s energy minister said Tuesday.

    “The virus was already identified and the right software was already prepared to neutralize it,” Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz told attendees of a computer security conference in Tel Aviv, according to this article published Tuesday by The Times of Israel. “We had to paralyze many of the computers of the Israeli Electricity Authority. We are handling the situation and I hope that soon, this very serious event will be over … but as of now, computer systems are still not working as they should.”

    The “severe” attack was detected on Monday as temperatures in Jerusalem dipped to below freezing, creating two days of record-breaking electricity consumption, according to The Jerusalem Post. Steinitz said it was one of the biggest computer-based attacks Israel’s power authority has experienced and that it was responded to by members of his ministry and the country’s National Cyber Bureau. The response included shutting down portions of Israel’s electricity grid. The energy minister didn’t identify any suspects behind the attack or provide details about how it was carried out.

    The attack comes five weeks after Ukraine’s power grid was successfully disrupted in what’s believed to be the world’s first known hacker-caused power outage.

    Hard to draw any conclusions from this. I found it interesting that they said they were sort of waiting for it and that they were ready to neutralize it.

    The one thing we can be sure about, we are going to see more of this, and it is only a matter of time till one or more of us are impacted by it.

    [Update, unlike this attack on Israel’s grid, the Ukraine outage was a very long and deliberate attack on just the electrical grid. The attackers first gained access to the workers remote log on system. Rather than doing anything there and then, they apparently spent months looking over the system layout and planed to take down as much of the system AND make it as difficult as possible to get back on line.
    Roughly, in order. They first replaced the firmware in the Ethernet to serial converters at many substations.
    Then, they replaced the firmware in several key UPS’s so that they would not do their job.
    Then, they simply turned off the breakers in the substations via the control system graphical interface.
    Once that was done, they formatted the computer hard drives as they backed out of the system.
    The last breaker they flipped was the control center, which, since the UPS was now out of action, even when the operators got the power back on for themselves, their computers would not boot…. Once they got that solved, they still had to drive out to the substations because they could not command the breakers to turn back on because of the borked firmware in the protocol converters.
    It was a spectacular hack. Key because it started with a human interface. Remote (from home) login].


    Computers 📎and tagged

  • Drone racing – first win

    Posted on by beno Comment

    Back February we blogged about drone racing.
    We blogged about it twice, once to introduce it, and then again to say how hard it was.
    Well, this past weekend, the first world championship race was held in Dubai and it was won (fittingly?) by a 15 year old.

    It’s a two minute video, nice overview of the track and how they set things up.

    The track looks pretty amazing. It would not have been cheap to build, but I think you really need something like it to make it compelling for the spectators.
    I also found it interesting that some of the spectators also had first person video viewers so they could race along with the pilots.
    If it were me, I know for a fact that I would have got motion sick. Big. Time.

    Anyway, looks like it was a ton of fun and I am sure the kid had a tiny bit left over from the 250,000 prize after he covers costs.

    Drone racing. It looks like it is here to stay and will only get bigger.
    (Crystal ball time….. Schools will try and hold races or have clubs that race, but lawyers will shut it down. Also automated drone racing will become a thing for universities and the like).


    Computers 📎and tagged

  • Network issues at home – back to stock Asus firmeware

    Posted on by beno Comment

    The router has crashed around 3-4 times (I am losing track) in the past 30ish hours.
    So, we have reset it back to stock Asus firmware.
    This is part one of a two part plan…. If it lasts until Sunday morning (a record if it does), it gets a stay of execution. If it crashes again with the same symptoms, then we are taking it back to Best Buy and getting another, the same (hopefully they have one in stock).

    Leaving the new one at stock for a week or three to see how it goes.

    So, thats the two part plan.
    See if the third party firmware was the issue.
    See if I just got a dud router.

    I just want a router that is reliable and that I can live with. Seems too much to ask at this point in time….


    Computers 📎and tagged

  • Precrime via IoT

    Posted on by beno Comment

    It’s happening.
    We have got to the point where there is a concentrated effort from a nation’s government to collect all the data it can about each and every citizen and then feed all that to an AI and look for patterns.
    Of course all this is in the name of safety…. But as I have said in the past, I am into tech, not politics, so how it gets sold to people is beyond the scope of my little brain.

    http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/china-is-building-a-big-data-plaform-for-precrime/

    It’s “precrime” meets “thoughtcrime.” China is using its substantial surveillance apparatus as the basis for a “unified information environment” that will allow authorities to profile individual citizens based upon their online behaviors, financial transactions, where they go, and who they see.

    As Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports, the Chinese government is leveraging “predictive policing” capabilities that have been used by US law enforcement, and it has funded research into machine learning and other artificial intelligence technologies to identify human faces in surveillance video.

    The Chinese government has plenty of data to feed into such systems. China invested heavily in building its surveillance capabilities in major cities over the past five years, with spending on “domestic security and stability” surpassing China’s defense budget—and turning the country into the biggest market for security technology. And in December, China’s government gained a new tool in surveillance: anti-terrorism laws giving the government even more surveillance powers and requiring any technology companies doing business in China to provide assistance in that surveillance.

    The law states that companies “shall provide technical interfaces, decryption and other technical support and assistance to public security and state security agencies when they are following the law to avert and investigate terrorist activities”—in other words, the sort of “golden key” that FBI Director James Comey has lobbied for in the US.

    So what do we have here? In a nutshell, all the personal IoT data that we have been talking about for the past twoish years.
    I had no idea that things were so advanced in China in this regard.
    One quote in there really jumped out at me…. “spending on “domestic security and stability” surpassing China’s defense budget—and turning the country into the biggest market for security technology.”
    I really wish I had some time to dig into that fact and double check it… It just blows my mind that they are spending more on domestic security than defense…. that is a number that I just really want to question….
    That aside, in a nutshell, I have read that the iPhone is selling gangbusters in China, so, if that is the case, then can it be said that the Chinese government has no trouble getting the information they need from everyone’s phone?

    How might this be possible? We all leak data. We all have an electronic smog signature that is unique to each of us. Even our encrypted data leaves a trail. In order for our devices to work, to interoperate with other devices, there is a handshake, a data exchange, encrypted or otherwise. That handshake is unique for each device. It is trivial then to build a pattern of time and use even if the actual conversation is unreadable.

    The problem is this (as I see it), they (we) do not have a model for what a pre-crime terror act looks like.
    AI is good at identifying cars because we can set it up on a public road and teach it what cars look like. It learns and builds confidence in identifying cars.
    AI is like a child, it learns from its parents, it watches them to know what it should and should not do.
    Just data, with no context, with no end goal, is just noise, no matter how much you throw at it, it still can not learn any patterns if there is no model patten.
    It would seem the Chinese are working on this part, but since they do not have a pattern, they are only looking for things they consider obvious, a person with no known family members overseas making lots of off shore phone calls for example.

    So what’s really going on?

    My buddy Dan pointed out many many years ago that the scales tipped when the phone directory switched and put the business up front and the people at the back. He was so insightful that it is a little scary. People have become the new currency. Who we are, who we talk to, where we shop etc is the way money changes hands.
    Sure, China might be spinning it as safety and acts of terror preventer, but the fact is, those events do not happen daily, money changes hands every second of every day and night… In other words, a nation wide ‘security system’ needs to pay for itself between acts of terror.

    You will not be able to buy or sell without your electronic smog signature before long… Now where have I heard that before?


    Computers 📎and tagged

  • Network issues at home – the kill packet

    Posted on by beno 2 Comments

    Non-tech description first…….
    The network is ‘glitching’ every 1 to 3 days.
    I have no idea what it is, or why it is doing it. I just know it happens at any time it wants.
    When it happens, I lose network connectivity to the Internet and between devices at the house. This means that if my website is down, sorry. Send me an email. I do not have anything automatic set up to let me know when it goes down, because when it goes down, I cant send emails!
    It is driving me nuts!

    Techo version.
    The Asus router has a lot going for it. I really like a lot of its features and it seems to be powerful enough to do the job when things are going smooth.

    The frustrating thing is that I have not had more than 2 days of a working network since all this started. I have not been blogging about it because I have been spending my time trying to find and fix it. (The other generic blogs are all scheduled blogs that I wrote ages ago).

    It is annoying because once it goes down, the only way I can find to get things back up is to reboot the router.
    Here is the thing, I am not 100% sure it is even the router that is causing the issue.
    It seemed like it was at first. Like there was a memory leak or something (keeping an eye on the status page of the router does not show anything like that).
    I then setup a cronjob to reboot the router at 3:14am every morning….. When whatever it is that glitches does the same thing as when the router reboots. It will take out random devices around the network. Not just take them out, but sometimes services on those devices.
    For example. It will glitch one or more Linux PC’s. Sometimes they refuse to ping, sometimes they ping fine, but the web server service does not respond, or it pings fine, but the SNMP service goes south. Sometimes it is the Linux boxes, sometimes the Opto controllers, sometimes the Arduino, sometimes a combination of devices, sometimes a single device. The best way to get them back is to just unplug their network connection, count to three, plug it back in and they are fine.

    Why is it not the router? Because I have had times when the router stays up, but that sort of glitch goes through the network and takes out one or more devices. I can not seem to find a way to log the system from the firewall on the Asus, so all the traffic data is bound up in the core Linux router log data. Having some issues finding a clear way to log it to the USB stick rather than RAM, so I have not been able to view any logs.
    Sometimes it happens when I am at home, and sometimes when I am at work.

    Is is like there is a kill packet floating around taking out stuff at random.

    The worst is when it happens and no one is at home.

    It reminds me of what was happening to Ipcop. Where it just glitched and went weird. I blamed Ipcop or the PC it was running on, but now the Asus is doing the same things.

    To top it all off, I am trying to monitor the network traffic to see what is going on and I have found that my network is circulating around 90 gigabytes of traffic every 24 hours… does that seem like a lot to you, because it seems to be an insane amount to me!

    I thought it might be the Verizon ONT, so we got the guy to come out and change it. Nice side effect is that we now have speeds over 100Mbs, so when it’s working, the Internet fairly screams at our place.
    I also changed out the two switches in the place for gigabit versions and that did not change the glitches, but again, when its working, everything hauls ass big time.

    Blood pressure was up again this morning. 132/93
    I do not have any clue what is going on. I do not have a plan to move forward.

    In other news, a blog reader, David, very kindly sent me a Ubiquiti Wifi AP to evaluate and integrate into the system. I have been using it because one of my frustrations with the Asus is that I can not seem to get more than 30Mbs speed from the Wifi…. The UBNT is doing the same speed…. it is nice to have something to compare against, so now I know it is my wifi devices… Only they get ~50+ at work, so I know it’s not the devices…..


    Computers 📎and tagged