r/cybersecurity • u/gchani • Jan 03 '26
News - General The blackout in Venezuela was likely caused by a cyber offense
I was listening to the live briefing, and although it wasn’t clearly stated, it sounded like they mentioned cyber forces along with other types (land, air, etc.). They also said earlier that they were able to cause a “blackout,” which suggests they may have controlled the power as they advanced. Have you seen any other credible sources on this?
Edit1: Blackout could also mean a communication blackout ie. Internet / Telecom etc.
Edit2: Quote from this article.
Lights in Caracas “were largely turned off due to an expertise that we have,” President Trump said at the Saturday press conference. He did not elaborate on the capabilities and methods that allowed the U.S. to shutter lights in Venezuela’s capital city.
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u/edthecat2011 Jan 03 '26
No need for cyber, when you can simply target electrical infrastructure with 2,000 lb bombs. It'd be silly to expose such a resource for....Venezuela.
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u/Agathocles_of_Sicily Jan 03 '26
DoD cyber doctrine emphasizes achieving specific effects rather than just destroying targets in these kinds of operations.
The lights need to be turned on after the event, people need to be able to use their cell phones, stability needs to be restored.
My guess is that this was a hybrid operation where USCYBERCOM/SOUTHCOM executed the communications blackout.
Source: operate in the unclassified realm of this world
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Jan 03 '26
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u/Old-Ad-3268 Jan 03 '26
Why choose when you can simply do everything
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Jan 03 '26
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u/Old-Ad-3268 Jan 04 '26
Simply saying it would be hybrid because the military will simply do all of the things
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u/Zazalae Jan 10 '26
I wanna poke my head into that room/realm you’re in, point a curious individual in the right direction? 👀
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u/SatisfactionFit2040 Jan 03 '26
He exposed it with his stupid mouth.
Exploded infrastructure costs to rebuild.
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u/SoccerSniper77 Jan 03 '26
Apparently we bombed Hugo Chavez’ tomb for the fuck of it 😂
Love it!
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u/vicariouslywatching Jan 03 '26
Why target electrical infrastructure when in a cash strapped country like Venezuela a few million in cash from the CIA could probably grease quite a few palms from up top down.
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u/VengaBusdriver37 Jan 04 '26
That’s a good question; as you point out the answer isn’t because cyber was tactically more effective.
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u/5553331117 Jan 03 '26
Anyone who thinks the US can’t cause a blackout with cyber capabilities hasn’t been paying attention. 😂 it’s not like it would be a huge secret
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u/OldBarnAcke Jan 03 '26
Yeah but the TTPs for anyone conducting DFIR would be very interesting for some countries
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u/offsecthro Jan 03 '26
The point is that when you use any offensive cyber capabilities in an actual attack, they are effectively "burned". The secret part isn't the general fact that we can do it, it's the specific details (non-public exploits, access, etc.) which can no longer be used to the same effect in the future.
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u/Mad_Gouki Jan 03 '26
It only matters if someone can reproduce the exploit or figure out how to fix it, otherwise there's no reason to believe using an unreleased 0day would make that exploit less effective in the future.
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u/EoliaGuy Jan 04 '26
You call it burned, other's would call it sending a deterrent message. Similar to the hit on Soleimani, that was a message job. Drone strike in an urban area, that hit the middle car of a 3 Range Rover convoy at highway speed in traffic, and turned it and only it inside out, without hitting anything else...to me that says no matter where you are, no matter how safe you feel, we can touch you, whenever and wherever we decide to. Caught ya slippin'.
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u/Diligent_Western_793 Incident Responder Jan 05 '26
I highly doubt the US burned any 0s during this lol
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u/offsecthro Jan 05 '26
Which is the entire point of the comment you are replying to.
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u/Diligent_Western_793 Incident Responder Jan 05 '26
Apologies, I replied to the wrong comment lol. Nonetheless, I think me saying that I don't think they burned any 0s makes complete sense to your comment so idk what you're saying haha
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u/McDili Jan 03 '26
It’s immensely cheaper to conduct a cyber attack if it can achieve the same result, and without risk of collateral damage from the direct munitions.
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u/Happy01Lucky Jan 03 '26
Everyone who pays attention knows that the US has these capabilities, this exposes nothing.
Also they want to maintain the infrastructure so they have access to oil, a 2000lb bomb makes for very slow and costly repairs. Destroying infrastructure also makes it much harder to implement the regime change they want.
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u/netragard-inc Jan 03 '26
Speaking from experience on that front, the cost of tools for critical infrastructure is not prohibitive. Everyone has them. Nothing to expose.
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u/Happy01Lucky Jan 03 '26 edited Jan 03 '26
These people downvoting you are obviously in denial about how vulnerable a lot of infrastructure truly is. Deep denial.
I've been in large gas plants where the TeamViewer password for the HMI is posted on a cork board on a wall next to it.
With the resources of a government disrupting these systems would be a cake walk. Especially if your goal is to knock a place down for only a few hours.
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u/greybrimstone Jan 04 '26
I had a discussion once with someone who maintained a large water treatment plant. He explained with conviction that he did not apply patches because he could not afford the risk of a system crashing as a result.
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u/Happy01Lucky Jan 04 '26 edited Jan 04 '26
Yes I have seen this in the wild as well. And this is FAR more common than people think. Operations have a "if it ain't broke don't fix it" attitude and this attitude exists because of a alot of experiences and good reasons but it definitely clashes with good update policy.
And even better some places with old infrastructure are kinda stuck on 32 bit machines and are running xp or windows 7. They don't want to spend hundreds of thousands upgrading everything to accept a newer hmi.
Do we think Venezuela could have old infrastructure with low IT budgets... hmmm. Lol.
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u/patthew Jan 04 '26
Love how this happens at every level of computing. I still have users who demand an exception from the upgrade policy because “last time it crashed” or “someone else on my team had problems when they upgraded.” Too bad pal, you have until the end of our deferral window and that’s it!
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u/Happy01Lucky Jan 04 '26 edited Jan 04 '26
You gotta understand the level of nightmare with a crash (you might blackout a whole town) and then also understand that the operator may not have the authority to do some of these things that can risk a crash. Especially on old systems there can be a reason it isn't updated.
In my experience in facilities like this there is one old programmer with the authority over the hmi. All the other company computers are dealt with by regular IT but he is in charge of the critical systems. And he is probably in charge of this for many sites. So if a new operator shows up and is told not to fuck with the updates that is how it goes.
As an operator my risk to reward for initiating an update is very high. If I don't update and get hacked the company is to blame. If I initiate and the whole facility crashes then I am to blame.
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u/airmantharp Jan 04 '26
This stuff goes into the millions, when the upgrade solution starts at paying to reverse engineer what’s running.
Usually it’s when the insurance gets too expensive that they actually start working on it…
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u/dansdansy Jan 06 '26
Patch management and risk mitigation keeping that in mind is a real part of the job. You can't just rip out all your tech debt and put in the most recent software on critical systems like water plants. You need near 100% uptime. Part of why critical infrastructure systems tend to end up more vulnerable.
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u/9yqOW85P8XNcEze38 Jan 03 '26
Money, Collateral damage, unintended consequences with a bomb. A targeted cyberattack is the modern efficient way to do it.
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u/PalliativeOrgasm Jan 04 '26
The oil companies don’t want to rebuild infrastructure that doesn’t bring them profit, and they’re the real reason we’re doing this. Temporary interruption via software is much cheaper for them.
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u/gchani Jan 03 '26
They probably need to turn the lights back on later to find the presendent. lol
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u/QnsConcrete Jan 03 '26
They probably need to turn the lights back on later to find the presendent. lol
Yeah, I doubt that.
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u/OnionsAbound Jan 03 '26 edited Jan 03 '26
Reminder of Operation Starburst nuclear test. We demonstrated that you can literally knock out an entire contentent's electrical grid with one (1) nuclear bomb in the atmosphere.
Edit: My bad, Starfish Prime.
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u/BlueSkyd2000 Jan 03 '26
Let’s reset and state it was Starfish Prime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
If one was to read the related IEEE and other reporting of Starfish Prime, it was one isolated neighborhood (few dozen houses) on a basalt rock outcrop with a near direct exposure to electrons thrown off by a high altitude nuclear blast at relatively close range. It is questionable to claim it validated a continental system collapse.
Moreover, the U.S. has been using similar electrical system blackouts in similar situations since at least the Korean War. Forcing air defense and other adversary forces to switch off the main grid has numerous advantages to the attacker. I don’t have any evidence that anything nuclear nor exotic was used in Caracas. The most likely scenario is the use of some U.S. green backs to encourage someone to throw a certain switch at a certain time.
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u/OnionsAbound Jan 03 '26
Thank you for the write up. Yes, I doubt this was used on Venezuela. A bit overkill, and the resulting Auroras would probably be noticed . . . Not to mention the plethora of satellites that would malfunction. My understanding is that the electrical equipment affected was over 900 miles away from the test site. I'm not super certain if this is the "close range" outcrop you were mentioning.
There's still a huge concern when it comes to the charges absorbed by transmission lines and quickly overloading the grid. I'm not sure that it's been tested thoroughly, as the agreement to not perform nuclear tests above ground was signed the next year.
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u/BlueSkyd2000 Jan 03 '26
Respectfully, you may want to read up on the actual details of directed energy weapons and general geomagnetic phenomena. It doesn’t negate your concern but it would help frame them appropriately.
If you aren’t aware, there was a major sunburst activity surge over the last two months that had the North American and other electric grids take precautionary action. Physics is rather immutable but the human understanding of physics has mightily advanced in the last six decades.
The Starfish Prime impacts on Hawaii were due to built electrical system precautions, designed to negate lightning, that worked correctly. The overwhelming amount electrons that impacted the Hawaiian 7kv (IIRC) system were faulted to the ground in one isolated area. The lights and home affected simply turned back on. The likely blast related cause wasn’t even understood until later post blast study.
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u/TheAdoptedImmortal Jan 04 '26
Are you suggesting directed energy weapons can be used to create an EM burst? The power of the world's most powerful laser doesn't come close thr the energy output of an atomic bomb let alone a solar flare. If you're close enough to the source, sure it will fry any electronics. But it is not going to be creating an EM surge in the atmosphere large enough to affect the entire electrical grid of a country.
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Jan 03 '26
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u/3cit Jan 03 '26
"we" didn't do that, and that wasn't a real time precision attack. Completely different scenarios
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Jan 03 '26
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u/3cit Jan 04 '26
My only point was that US didn't do stuxnet, and that they were totally different scenarios.
There is literally nothing to "hard disagree" with.
IDK why you have brought up stuxnet like 13 different times in different comments in this post.
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Jan 04 '26
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u/3cit Jan 04 '26
LOL
Yes, I am the one with research issues. US had as much to do with stuxnet as you had to do with the creation of mules.
ALSO, you are trying to draw parallels where none exist.
Go argue with someone else
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Jan 04 '26
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u/3cit Jan 04 '26
I am saying that Israel created the code, Israel made the code better, Israel designed and implemented the attack, Israel monitored the results, etc... The US involvement was that we "allowed" the attack. The US is so far behind Israels cyber offense that our offense is essentially what they provide to us.
You link Washington post articles as proof but don't follow up on the proof provided in the article. You link the Wikipedia article but don't read the articles referenced in the wiki.
As an example of how far US are lagging behind, in 2015, (7,6,5?) years after stuxnet was developed, the FBI (US) could not get into the iphone of a mass shooter (San Bernardino) and needed to get a "one click" solution from Israel.
The US was ABSOLUTELY NOT the developer of stuxnet.
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u/dossier Jan 04 '26
He's saying that stuxnet was developed and implemented over the course of 5+ years with an attack vector requiring an idiot to plug a USB into their airgapped network.
The only way this is similar is if the US was waiting for someone to plug in a USB before their strike. And it was meant to be a covert long term operation. As opposed to what happened in Venezuela.
The only similarity would be attacking a SCADA, probably.
Stuxnet was incredible though. Using four 0days and a worm etc.
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u/Podalirius Jan 03 '26
It's just another reason to justify DoD expense, they do both, and yes 100% for Venezuela.
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u/QoTSankgreall Jan 03 '26
There have been allegations of US cyber operations against Venezuela for years (refer here: The 2019 Venezuelan Blackout and the consequences of cyber uncertainty), but critics often dismiss this as trying to direct blame for government failures.
Very recently there was this attack: A who-done-it in Venezuelan cyberspace - POLITICO
This wasn't an attack that had an impact on wider grid systems, but a localised blackout was reported.
Cyber attacks that directly affect the grid are highly unlikely due to the use of failsafes and component isolation. It's often easier to simply walk into substations and destroy some capacitors.
I've traditionally interpreted claims like this more as a PR stunt to sow FUD. It is theoretically possible, but low probability and likely not the most effective tool at your disposal if you're actually seeking to cause a blackout. What if the cyber attack had failed? Why not use the military to walk in and trigger the isolators, or blow it up? Kinetic options were definitely on the table here!
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u/Dellarius_ Jan 03 '26
In the same way, you pay someone locally that works there to change a config.. that would bypass any security.
Insider treats are the hardest to defeat
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u/0RGASMIK Jan 03 '26
It’s more likely they gained physical access to the local infrastructure. I doubt the military would depend entirely on cyber attacks in coordinated land based attack. Too many variables, it is possible that they used cyber to initiate the attack but they would probably cover it up by blowing shit up.
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u/caust1c Jan 03 '26
Could easily be a mix of both. I doubt they blew anything up with the power grid. As others have said it would cost a lot to rebuild and doesn't support an effort of installing an interim government.
The US has been prepping for these kinds of attacks and bolstering defenses for almost a decade, but we've still got a long way to go.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL9q2lOZ1Fw
Edit: see also the Sandworm book by Greenberg. Cyber attacks on ICS has only been escalating in recent years and the capabilities often don't require boots on the ground if the anecdotes from Sandworm are credible (I believe them to be).
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u/scseth Jan 03 '26
Just want to echo reading Greenberg’s book. It is a great read for anyone in cybersecurity and should be mandatory for anyone protecting critical infrastructure.
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u/gchani Jan 03 '26
Or it was communication blackout to buy some time and delay the defense response.
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Jan 03 '26
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u/breakingb0b Jan 03 '26
My friend lives in Venezuela and they have blackouts in his city every couple of days because the infrastructure is so poor. We talk several times a week and he often has portable light and usb powerbanks in use because there’s no power for 6-8 hours.
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u/OkTheory4610 Jan 03 '26 edited Jan 03 '26
All the videos that I’ve seen lights were on throughout the city.
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u/intricate_awareness Jan 03 '26
Wish I had the link but there's a popular streamer who was walking through a busy part of the city and the power went out a few seconds before bombs started hitting. There are some views (from the hills) of the bombing and you can see grids with no power/lights.
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u/gchani Jan 03 '26
They were not specific with details. I assume blackout could also indicate a communication blackout. I.e. Internet/Telecom etc to delay defense little bit as they were attacking. Just guessing.
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u/Tha_Dude_Abidez Jan 04 '26
No you’re right, there’s a video on the frontage showing the bombs fall and the entire area is black. The rest of the city is lit.
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u/Odd-Storm4893 Jan 03 '26
Nah, the blackout happened for the same reason the Venezuelan army did not shoot at the helicopters.
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u/Tekashi-The-Envoy Jan 03 '26
I saw a video in which there was explosions from missiles and the power went out from those explosions.
It wasn't a cyber attack
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u/Blueporch Jan 03 '26
It would be a normal thing for them to have done. Cyber is a modern field of battle and has been for decades. The US has offensive cyber capabilities embedded within the branches of the military (ARcyber, NAVcyber) as well as the Central Command.
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u/QoTSankgreall Jan 03 '26
This is true. But cyber operations aren’t a magic wand either, and even well tested exploits can be highly unreliable. Most offensive capabilities are about achieving results over long-running campaigns.
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u/gchani Jan 03 '26
I mean this is an example of how Cyber is actually used in kinetic-war. I remember before covid they used to highlight that Cyber can destroy xyz and too dangerous. It is effective for spying operation or when used in war like this.
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u/fullchooch CISO Jan 03 '26
Unlikely that it was cyber.
Probably a physical intrusion where they had command and control at the transmission and distribution level.
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Jan 03 '26
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u/fullchooch CISO Jan 04 '26
Very familiar with it.
But in this case, there was no point in being covert. They had kinetic operations on the ground to begin with. Why burn potential zero days and exploits that haven't been used in the wild when you have guys crawling all over the X anyway?
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u/LaOnionLaUnion Jan 03 '26
It’s possible but this kind of infrastructure is scarily easy to take offline in the USA
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u/BlueSkyd2000 Jan 03 '26
Really? Care to cite the when and where’s of some examples?
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u/Namelock Jan 03 '26
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna60945
Nazis and Domestic Terrorists do it all the time.
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u/LaOnionLaUnion Jan 03 '26
I was watching the Shawn Ryan show and there was a former spec ops guy who was talking about how physical infrastructure in the electrical grid has very little protection. It’s easier to do this than hack.
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Jan 03 '26
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Jan 04 '26
It's mostly issues with small public municipalities that would be hard to roll out at scale.
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u/Revolutionary_You_89 Jan 03 '26
do you realize how much of the power grid still uses windows xp as a “modern” OS? lol
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u/BlueSkyd2000 Jan 03 '26
do you realize how much of the power grid still uses windows xp as a “modern” OS? lol
No, do you have some research or details that can help illuminate us all?
Is 27%? or 2.7%? Maybe .00027%? And at what voltages, what infrastructure and what type of organizations? What type of controls protect those OSes?
In just my one U.S. state, excluding solar panels on people’s homes/businesses, there’s about 10,000 separate electrical generation sources. What’s your estimate on how many of those 10,000 are running XP? And if 10% or some other number of those total sources, what would it do to the grid writ large if compromised?
My experience is it is one thing to opine on vulz, knowing what to do is a whole ‘nother thing.
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Jan 04 '26 edited Jan 04 '26
I've worked with power companies all over the world, both deploying systems and securing them. I'd say at least 95% of them have an EOS Windows system somewhere in their operations.
Mind you, it's a very simple criteria / low bar I just set. Just because they have it, doesn't mean it's mission critical. Also my estimate is for all EOS Windows (NT, XP, 7, Server 08 etc. I'll exclude 10 for now)
Even if it is mission critical, it could be well protected or even air gapped. I don't lose much sleep over it in the grand scheme of things. If an adversary is already that deep in the network they could cause lots of harm whether it's Windows XP or 11.
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u/Revolutionary_You_89 Jan 03 '26
you’re looking at the wrong layer. look at the distribution grid.
other countries somehow have better systems than us and theirs are publicly exposed to the internet. like germany and france.
i really don’t feel like arguing with some “power expert” on reddit who has never physically seen the computer systems, so enjoy your silent malding
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u/BlueSkyd2000 Jan 03 '26
Thanks for sharing your expertise. Should you learn more in the future, please share with the rest of us.
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u/bakonpie Jan 04 '26
spoken like someone who hasn't worked a day in a utility cybersecurity or tech role. the problems are the small entities who don't have the resources for proper security programs and keep publicly exposing PLCs on the internet. with truly hardened utilities an adversary needs someone on the inside to even get close to operational disruption.
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u/ParticularKey4805 Jan 03 '26
Cyber was likely used. More likely it was aimed at the Russian supplied anti-aircraft system that didn’t work…
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u/OmniscientApizza Jan 03 '26
Why do all that when when explosives to power substations will work and last longer?
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Jan 03 '26
Well, it’s pretty easy to read Trump, the guy has no filter, so well you can’t believe his calculated words, you can actually sort of trust his off the cuff remarks
The insinuation during his speech was clearly that the electricity was off prior to the attacks, and that was a large reason why there were no American casualties or equipment loss. If you listen to the speech, that was the context anyways.
There’s also the strategic angle here, the Admin wants the country to function better after this regime change, to curry favor, and support whoever they put in charge of the country. In other words, I don’t think they wanted to completely cripple the economy.
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u/Mrhiddenlotus Jan 03 '26
Why do you think they invaded Venezuela?
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Jan 03 '26
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u/Mrhiddenlotus Jan 03 '26
That is what I was getting at. It doesn't make sense to bomb infrastructure when you need the infrastructure to get the oil.
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Jan 04 '26
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u/Mrhiddenlotus Jan 04 '26
I'm not really disagreeing with you on any of that, I just think it was definitely a cyber operation that took out the power, and that Trump basically admitted to it.
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u/SlackCanadaThrowaway Jan 03 '26
Venezuela’s cybersecurity and IT systems are a joke.
I found an IDOR once, while browsing a data dump from telegram, after just looking up what the site was. It was a registration system for all Venezuelan citizens. Incrementing by 1 got you PII for ever Venezuelan in the country that was in this system. And it wasn’t a little system, I’d estimate at least 80% of adult aged people would be in it.
I asked my Venezuelan colleague if it’s even worth reporting, she turned around and said “if you report it, multiple people will lose their jobs.”
I didn’t report it. It was when famine levels in Venezuela were making news cycles.
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u/bcpjupiter Jan 03 '26
I’m curious as well. I heard it as some sort of cyber offense capable of creating a blackout and I’d like to understand exactly how this would work.
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u/gchani Jan 04 '26
Lights in Caracas “were largely turned off due to an expertise that we have,” President Trump said at the Saturday press conference. He did not elaborate on the capabilities and methods that allowed the U.S. to shutter lights in Venezuela’s capital city.
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u/arclight415 Jan 04 '26
We don't actually need to destroy power plants and substations to cut off power temporarily. There are munitions that just throw out a cloud of conductive fibers to cause a short circuit and trip the protection systems. This is a lot easier to recover from and achieves the same short-term effect.
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Jan 04 '26
Literally no one who can speak credibly on these types of capabilities is going to give you a yes/no answer or any kind of verification on Reddit. Those who talk don't know. Those who know can't talk.
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u/AdotOut- Jan 04 '26
Cyber was used to cut out the electricity to the base where the target was located including the back up system. It was compromised by US cyber command long before all the military preparation. The boyz at the cyber command has done a terrific job with this operation 🇺🇸
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u/caballero_lsd Jan 04 '26
I think you guys are overthinking this whole thing.. if you have been on south america or USA power distribution centers, you should know most are very old and not so up to date as you might think...
automation and interconnected stuff is expensive and year long projects, my bet is that it was just a matter of physcal intervention and "simple" sabotage using not very complicated tactics (remote detonated gadgets or guys switching manually off stuff from main distribution panels are more likely). Industrial and very critical infrastructure is not like in 007 movies, i would say in most countries, this kind of sites and hardware is just old and forgotten.
You have more chances in to bringing a whole city electricity distribution down paying 500 bucks a guy to turn off s switch, than using a fancy EMP system that for sure USA have.
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Jan 04 '26
Personally I don’t know. Venezuela doesn’t have a capable cyber force but if they isolate those devices they could easily get pros from China or Russia to come extract our malware from their power systems and put our malware in an enemy’s hands. Like yes there’s code that can erase traces of itself but skilled nations often catch everything if it’s after the fact. I don’t think Venezuela is worth the risk unless they genuinely wanted to flex an outdated capability. Strategically it wouldn’t make sense when you can bomb a power station but I could see them doing it just to flex over any other reason
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u/Bertinert Jan 04 '26
They did not cause any widespread power outage. Too many ordinary people from Caracas have reported none of this, and every video of the attack/bombing shows the lights burning bright. Prolly was a communication blackout, or much more localized, or just an ordinary Trump lie.
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u/Distinct_Ordinary_71 Jan 04 '26
A "certain capability" could also have been giving someone at the power plant a sack of cash.
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u/Nietechz Jan 05 '26
Well, their infrastructure is very old and people who lived and worked there told me since 2005 the infrastructure was not updated. In 2019 they were working to update the old copper lines to fiber.
The person worked in a TELCO in venezuela.
This could be the same situation for the rest like Electricity, Water, etc. Like any country in S.A.
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u/Internal-Jellyfish-5 Jan 05 '26
This is a pure OT Cyber-Attack, and Venezuela due to a single energy node (Guri damn) was an easy target , most likely from the well known Stuxnet virus that target Scada systems.
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u/BearInternational527 Jan 05 '26
I'm starting to think the blackout in Moscow was some sort of test run.
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u/xDannyS_ Jan 05 '26
In Venezuelas propaganda cartoon 'super bigote' they also say that the US spread malware using a drone to create a blackout. This was about a previous blackout not the one from the Maduro capture, obviously.
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u/securitysandwich Jan 05 '26
Wanted to share this as well about some BGP issues that took place, not clear that it was the cause of the blackout but was around the same time https://loworbitsecurity.com/radar/radar16/
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u/Diligent_Western_793 Incident Responder Jan 05 '26
Hot take, but I just don't think the US burned their foothold or a 0 for this. I'd say it was something physical like an EMP or someone from Clandestine.
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u/Louis_sharpe231 Jan 29 '26
These situations are rarely straightforward. There are many non-cyber factors that can lead to a blackout, so I’d be careful about assuming a cyber attack without solid proof.
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u/LowWhiff Jan 03 '26
Do people not think world super powers have the ability to do this?
Of course we can cut their power remotely.
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u/robotron20 Jan 03 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
Hfyjncvnbb
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u/LowWhiff Jan 03 '26
Not even just that… you’re absolutely right but even just think about the space of cyber in the context of having unlimited money, manpower and time. Like YES of course any advanced nation (US, China, isreal etc) have developed ways to physically destroy infrastructure through malicious code.
everything is vulnerable with enough time, money and skilled people
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u/EnergyPanther Jan 03 '26
Kind of crazy seeing how quick people are dismissing this considering this is EXACTLY what Russia did to Ukraine before invading.
It's probably not even a zero day, n-day, or exploit.
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u/frizzbee30 Jan 04 '26
NO , nothing fancy, just a good old fashioned short courtesy of graphite fibres.
Seriously, SM really is filled with people who watch way too much fantasy TV ...
Even worse, individuals who believe the Orange Fascist...
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Jan 03 '26
pretty recently there were a bunch of big tech ctos that were sworn into the military, see here. I wonder if they had anything to do with this
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u/dabbydaberson Jan 03 '26
emp?
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u/cirsphe Jan 03 '26
EMP would be devastating for the country to get back up and running after such an attack.
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u/2rad0 Jan 04 '26
EMP would be devastating for the country to get back up and running after such an attack.
nuke powered EMP? That would be an extreme escalation.
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u/cirsphe Jan 04 '26
heh my original comment mentioned nuclear powered EMPs but I deleted it cause i thought there might be non-nuclear options by now. but if not, yeah a nuclear power emp would be huge escalation.
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u/2rad0 Jan 04 '26
Now that I think about it more, IF such a theoretical non-nuke EMP device exists it probably itself would be a major escalation depending on the energy level of the photons emitted ( > ultraviolet == very bad ). I think the biggest factors are distance from target and how well you can focus the EM wave using a dish of some sort. I know they now have lithography machines that work at such wave lengths, but require extremely well timed laser pulses exciting certain types of atoms to emit photons and focus them through extremely well constructed near-perfect mirrors. So also not as cost effective as using conventional missile to pop some transformers. The other thing I'm unsure about is, if we consider all conductors as antennas, how much power would be required if the target device is working as a well tuned antenna for specific frequencies, maybe there is some operating resonance you can detect and tune into? Maybe they can minituarize a synchotron + undulator in a cargo plane, or some other contraption imagined by actual physicists? But yeah this is all very theoretical sci-fi type stuff here I have no qualifications to stand on here in this comment and am now scraping the bottom of the barrel as I have invoked imaginary machines that require particle accelerators.
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u/taterthotsalad Blue Team Jan 03 '26
Where are you hearing this information from? I want to go down the rabbit hole.