Unix admin tried to axe power grid
Lonnie Denison pleaded guilty to charges that he
shut down the datacenter responsible for managing
the state of California's energy grid
By Robert McMillan, IDG News Service
December 14, 2007
A California man pleaded guilty Friday to charges
that he shut down the datacenter responsible for
managing the state's electrical supply.
Lonnie Denison, 33, is now facing as much as five
years in prison and a $250,000 fine after
admitting to breaking a glass cover and hitting
the emergency "off" switch at the California
Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO) data center
in Folsom, California, on April 15. By doing so,
he shut off the power in the datacenter. He was
formerly a contract Unix system administrator at
the center.
Cal-ISO is the nonprofit organization that manages
California's power. By knocking these systems
offline, Denison effectively cut the state off
from the energy market, leaving California
vulnerable to blackout conditions. No blackouts
occurred, however, because the data center went
down at 11:23 p.m. on a Sunday -- a time when
electricity demand is typically at a lull. "If
this deliberate shut-off had occurred in the
morning ... things would have been far more
severe," wrote Matthew Amant, the California
Highway Patrol officer assigned to investigate the
incident, in an affidavit.
It's not clear why Denison would have wanted to
flip the switch on California's power, but
according to U.S. attorneys, he was in a dispute
with co-workers and just minutes before the
incident had discovered that his computer
privileges had been revoked.
Prosecutors allege that he followed up the power
outage by sending an e-mail bomb threat the next
day to an unnamed Cal-ISO employee, saying, "Hey,
at one point I respected you ... you have a new
kid. So this is only because of him. Get out
before the timer expires. Not long now. Take care."
Following this threat, Cal-ISO evacuated about 500
employees from all three of its Folsom campus
buildings, transferring control of the grid to a
second control center.
That same day Denison spoke with a friend,
admitting that he had tried to "shut off the power
grid," according to a statement from the U.S.
Department of Justice.
The Sunday night incident knocked the data center
down for about two hours, but it took 20 computer
technicians about seven hours to fully restore the
system. The total cost of the outage is estimated
at $14,000.
Denison, of Sacramento, California, is set to be
sentenced on Feb. 29, 2008, in federal court.
Now, here's the thing: is this a cyber event? Well, yes and no. It is a physical attack by a cyber-knowledgeable insider-- who knew, because of his inside knowledge, exactly which button to push.
We need to remember, as we monitor for cyber attack that, as science fiction grandmaster Robert Heinlein once wrote, "While your supersoldier is busy reading his verniers, somebody a little more simply armed, say with a stick, is going to come up behind him and bash him over the head."
