Although early conclusions suggest a cyber attack was not the cause of the historic April 28 power outages in Spain, Portugal, and parts of France, only time and the inevitable investigations will tell. The blackout does bring to mind another outage that was worsened by malware: the Aug. 14, 2003, blackout in the North America. Take a look back in this edition of Tech Time Warp.
Beginning at 4:10 p.m. ET that day, 50 million people in the Northeastern United States and parts of Canada began losing power as 21 power plants shut down in only three minutes. Service restored in some localities within two hours, but many people remained stuck on subway trains for over two hours.. A joint U.S.-Canadian task force eventually traced the start of the blackout back to overgrown trees. The contact with trees shut down a power line—which should have tripped an alarm. But the alarm didn’t go off, beginning a domino effect that ultimately cost an estimated $6 billion in damages. In some places, the power was off for four days.
The Blaster worm is thought to have lengthened response time. Just three days before the blackout, Microsoft had issued an alert warning about the worm, which affected machines running Windows 2003/XP/2000/NT. The payload included causing a machine to reboot every 60 seconds. While Blaster was not the cause of the Aug. 14, 2003, blackout, experts believed companies may have had slower response times because their computers were affected by Blaster—and the U.S.-Canadian task force did ultimately identify a software bug (but not malware) that was responsible for the alarm system failure.
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This post originally appeared on Smarter MSP.