Per Beta News:

A team of experts headed by security guru Ira Winkler was hired by an anonymous power company to test the security of a power grid’s network. The door was practically held open for them.

In a matter of hours, the team infiltrated the grid’s supervisory, control and data acquisition (SCADA) networks using simple phishing tools: social engineering and browser exploits.

What sort of special technology did these people use to get the necessary information?  They got employees to hand it to them.  Per Switched:

They relied on human nature to get initial access, finding the e-mail addresses of many of the plant’s employees and sending them a supposedly corporate e-mail that indicated their worker benefits were being cut. They were directed to a URL to get more information. That URL was, of course, bogus and simply resulted in the installation of malicious software.

On the plus side, many of these security vulnerabilities are relatively easy to fix.  If only companies were willing to take the scheduled downtime to fix them.  Once again, per Beta News:

Winkler says that these SCADA systems suffer the same vulnerabilities any system does that runs on the same standard operating system and server hardware. Companies have perpetuated the weakness of these systems by not performing important software upgrades because they would force downtime.

And lest you think that the worst thing that can happen is a minor power outage, I will add this one more passage from Beta News:

What could be done given the level of access these white hats obtained would not be limited to simply shutting down a grid, like a group of hackers managed to do for 17 days to a “practice network” in California in 2001. In comments to CNN last year regarding a leaked video of a staged hack that resulted in the self-destruction of a power generator, Joe Weiss of Applied Control Solutions said, “What people had assumed in the past is the worst thing you can do is shut things down. And that’s not necessarily the case. A lot of times the worst thing you can do, for example, is open a valve — have bad things spew out of a valve.”

Just when I was thinking there weren’t enough things to worry about…

Scalia denies that the controversial decision was political and discusses other aspects of his public and private life in a interview with 60 Minutes  Sunday, April 27, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

“I say nonsense,” Scalia responds to Stahl’s observation that people say the Supreme Court’s decision in Gore v. Bush was based on politics and not justice. “Get over it. It’s so old by now. The principal issue in the case, whether the scheme that the Florida Supreme Court had put together violated the federal Constitution, that wasn’t even close. The vote was seven to two,” he says, referring to the Supreme Court’s decision that the Supreme Court of Florida’s method for recounting ballots was unconstitutional.

Furthermore, says the outspoken conservative justice, it was Al Gore who ultimately put the issue into the courts. “It was Al Gore who made it a judicial question…. We didn’t go looking for trouble. It was he who said, ‘I want this to be decided by the courts,'” says Scalia. “What are we supposed to say — ‘Not important enough?'” he jokes.

Doesn’t bother me at all,over it totally ….ah ..vaffanculo ,Nino  See over it,let’s move on .  

The latest attempt at campaign finance reform just went down in defeat, after yet another failure to override a gubernatorial veto. The bill may have been destined to run up against the same Supreme Court wall as the last one, given the Bushco court’s arbitrary, subjective gobbledegook about what sort of limits are and aren’t acceptable, but the Legislature decided to be incremental in their accommodations of the unfavorable ruling hoping for maximum benefit, and they had the support of campaign finance activists, so I sez more power to ’em. Douglas, of course, was foursquare against it, as it would’ve turned off the national party mega-spigot that floods in to support his re-election at the end of the campaign season every cycle. No surprise there.

No, the reason Douglas’s veto was upheld was because of one lone defection: Rep. Darryl Pillsbury, Independent of Windham County, who is hoping voters will promote him to Senator this November. Why the change of heart? Was it philosophical? Ethical? Technical?

Hardly:

Pillsbury voted in favor of the override last year.

That was before he announced his campaign to run for senator in the upcoming election.

Pillsbury admits that he is basing his decision on his own need to raise money for his Senate run and he is siding with the governor because he said he cannot support a bill that would put him at a disadvantage during the election.

“I’ve never had to raise money before,” Pillsbury said, adding that he has won his past House races with a $300 budget. “I am being selfish now. For independents, this campaign law stinks.”

There it is: pure self-interest. Dollar signs. Can you think of any statement that should make someone less qualified to be in a position to write our state’s laws? Exactly what is so much better for independents under the current campaign finance regime?

A lot of Windham County voters have been idealizing this guy because of his stance on impeachment (funny, I’ve never heard them comment on his endorsement of the far left’s favorite Presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton). But this is the danger of single-issue myopia. Votes like this can’t be ignored. Nor should it be ignored that he continues to find himself AWOL when Vermont Yankee issues come up for a vote.

Windham County can do better than this guy.

A GMD tip of the hat to Lawrence Auclaire, who is retiring and shutting down evacuationplans.org at the end of April. Originally created in 2003 to “improve evacuation plans for senior citizens and the disabled”, the site became a clearinghouse for Vermont Yankee activism. The site will stay up for an indefinite period as an archive.

Curtis Awards tomorrow! Looks like I’ll be going after all. The show is at the Hilton in Burlington at 6:30, and features Chris Dodd as a keynote for the event that will honor Dottie Deans and Doug Racine. If you still want to go, but the $60/head price tag is too steep, check with the VDP to see if there’s still space, as they don’t want to turn anybody away. Just give what you can.

Please join us in some eye-rolling: Jack wrote an annoyed letter to 7 Days, which an unnamed editor couldn’t contain themselves from responding to. Aside from the minor chuckle I got from their reference to an online archive that doesn’t seem to exist, I wasn’t inclined to express any more annoyance than I had already, but in response to our frustration that Shay Totten’s introductory column chose to use the needlessly (and inappropriately) self-aggrandizing phrase “Seven Days has learned” to report a “scoop” that had already been reported at this site two days previously (before their publication deadline) – and one day previously in both the St. Albans Messenger and Vermont Tiger (specifically, Peter Shumlin’s eyeing of the Lieutenant Governor’s race), Seven Days had to add a little more insult to injury:

Shay’s reporting also allowed him to say Shumlin will run for lieutenant governor, as opposed to merely thinking about it, which is what the GMD reported.

LOL! Sorry, there – I guess the GMD headline “Looking like a Symington-Shumlin Ticket for the top two ballot spots” was a little too… uhhhh… non-committal? Heh.

Sorry, folks. Lots of people knew that rumor – which is why the St. Albans Messenger and Vermont Tiger didn’t credit GMD – but the point is, they didn’t try to use language that passed it off as some sort of exclusive, either – especially given that the story had already been put out there by another media outlet (or three). As I said before – tacky, tacky, tacky…. only now it’s spiced with a touch of pathetic as well.