Our Infrastructure Data Integrity is safe - NOT!

"A hacker compromised a U.S. Army database that holds sensitive information about vulnerabilities in U.S. dams, according to a news report.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ National Inventory of Dams contains information about 79,000 dams throughout the country and tracks such information as the number of estimated deaths that could occur if a specific dam failed. It’s accessible to government employees who have accounts. Non-government users can query the database but cannot download data from it.

The breach began in January and was only uncovered in early April, according to the Free Beacon, a nonprofit online publication, which first published the news." 

So the C.O.E. had a data breach.  On something that actually quite terrifies me.  Have you ever lived underneath or down stream of a Dam?  I have.  I used to live just down stream of the Dams at Clearwater Lake and Lake Wappapello, back in the late 90's.  I remember driving home to Piedmont from my job in St. Louis 140 miles away and crossing the bridge over the St. Francois River on 34 literally 10 minutes before the state closed the road, and I had to run 80 miles out of my way to get back to St. Louis.  However the county was testing the sirens and emergency evac plan in case Clearwater Dam breached, and Wappapello Dam was in divert mode because the Black River was at near record levels.  A dam failing is what is known as a "Bad" thing.

Here is a vid and links to info about the Teton Dam failure that took 14 lives and caused almost 1 Billion dollars in damage.



Teton Dam Failure (University of California Santa Barbara Link)

Teton Dam (Wikipedia)

Dam Failure (Wikipedia entry with list of Dam Failures)

Just check out some of those links and there attendant sub links.  You can see why the thought of a Dam Failure terrifies me.  And there was just a security failure where information about all of the Dams in the United States is located.  That scares me even more than the idea of being under a failing Dam.  Because now we don't know if the person who accessed the information is just someone who really likes Dam's (And those people exist, many years ago I met a man and his wife both retired engineers who spent their retirement driving their RV around to all the Dams in the US and taking pictures of them and the wildlife around them) or if it is someone with ill intentions.  And if you have ever seen Force 10 from Navarone, or if you were in the Armed Forces, you realize just how fragile our Dams actually are.  So the idea that any detailed info on them is now out in the wild so to speak is one more thing to add to the little box of fears I think everyone has.

Some people will read this and scoff at the idea that I'm blowing this out of proportion.  Can you honestly look around you with everything that is happening in our world today and say that the possibility of some type of attack on our various infrastructure such as Dams is 100% TOTALLY impossible?

Can you?