[Alouette]

Alouette checking in from Southfield, Michigan (just across "8 Mile"). Power out all day Friday. Power came on across the street at about 9:30pm Friday. Neighbors on our block really PISSED. Our power came back on at 1:30am Saturday, being the Sabbath we couldn't turn on appliances or computers until this evening.

I just don't have the patience to go through this massive thread. Of course I think it was sabotage. Here's my list of suspects, in order:

1. A Green (probably Canadian)
2. Disgruntled laid-off outsourced utilities employee
3. A Raghead
4. The Y2K bandaid fell off.

[Ed_in_NJ]

FYI - all I know about this is below, as appears at - http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/bugtraq/2003-08/0231.html:

From: Virtual Master (vmastermmd.ath.cx) Date: Fri Aug 15 2003 - 13:49:06 CDT

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.