The german publishing house "heise", producing the magazines c't and ix, got a news on their page mentioning a probable link between the worm and the power outage. http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/ju-15.08.03-001/ The article is in german, but I'm trying to translate the important pieces to english: The failing niagara power-plant belongs to National Grid USA. That power-supplier is listed as a reference customer of Northern Dynamics. Norhtern Dynamics labeled themselves as "Home of the OPC Experts" and offer a range of products that use OPC for control and operation systems. OPC stands for "Ole for process control" and is based on microsofts COM/DCOM model. In a network affected by the W32.Blaster worm the DCOM-communcation fails, and therefor OPC fails on unpatched systems. OPC is employed among other things for the linking of so called SCADA systems (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), as used by power-plants. The OPC experts from northern dynamics also list General Electrics, Siemens AG, european power-plant constructor ABB and the european organization for nuclear research as reference customers. Best regards, Dominic On Thu, 14 Aug 2003, Geoff Shively wrote: > Just flipped on CNN, watching the masses snake through the streets of > Manhattan as correspondents state that this could be an affect of the > blaster worm. > > Interesting but I don't see how an worm of this magnitude (smaller than that > of Slammer/Sapphire and others) could influence DCS and SCADA systems around > the US, particularly just in the North East. > > Thoughts? > > > Cheers, > > Geoff Shively, CHO > PivX Solutions, LLC > > Are You Secure? > http://www.pivx.com > >
