Tracking the blackout bug
A number of factors and failings came together to make the August 14th northeastern blackout the worst outage in North American history. One of them was buried in a massive piece of software compiled from four million lines of C code and running on an energy management computer in Ohio.
To nobody's surprise, the final report on the blackout released by a U.S.-Canadian task force Monday puts most of blame for the outage on Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corp., faulting poor communications, inadequate training, and the company's failure to trim back trees encroaching on high-voltage power lines. But over a dozen of task force's 46 recommendations for preventing future outages across North America are focused squarely on cyberspace.
That may have something to do with the timing of the blackout, which came three days after the relentless Blaster worm began wreaking havoc around the Internet -- a coincidence that prompted speculation at the time that the worm, or the traffic it was generating in its efforts to spread, might have triggered or exacerbated the event. When U.S. and Canadian authorities assembled their investigative teams, they included a computer security contingent tasked with looking specifically at any cybersecurity angle on the outage.
