Technology analyst Tod Maffin debunks claims that a recent internet worm caused Canada's power outages, explaining the worm only spreads between computers and targets Microsoft servers. Though some high-traffic sites are slower and regional servers in Ontario and New York are offline, the internet's military-designed routing automatically reroutes traffic around failures.
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Tod Maffin is our technology analyst for Canada Now, and he is in Winnipeg today. And Tod, you know, when I first heard about this outage, there were some people in the building here who wondered if there was a link with terrorism. Some people immediately identified it potentially as a problem that had been created by overload of the electrical system. But I kind of wondered about that, that worm, that internet worm that you and I were talking about on the program a couple of days ago, and whether it had an impact on this. Did you have any sense Suspicions about that when you first heard about these cascading power outages?
Sure, right at first. I mean, that's certainly one of the things that's been talked about a lot. There is absolutely no connection between the two. The two are just— there's no possible way. The way this worm, as it were, this computer virus was programmed was to do two things. One was simply to spread to other computers, and the second is Saturday morning to attack a very specific server at Microsoft. It cannot get into power stations. It has no way of sort of directing that, and it's simply not in the code to be able to do that. That said, the Windows operating system has been known to have some problems— in it. They're continually patching it. And of course, we'll have yet to see whether or not the operating systems of the computers have caused some sort of problem down the line. But as far as the worm, no connection.
Well, that's good to hear. Now I'm curious about what impact all of this might have on the internet, because on the one hand, you have hundreds of thousands, millions, obviously, of potential internet users who can't get on because the power is down. On the other hand, perhaps some of the important contributors to the internet aren't able to serve people In other parts of North America that don't have the power outage, any sense of what impact this massive outage has had on the net?
Yeah, a sense. I mean, it's very interesting. A lot of the actual websites themselves that you would expect to be busy, such as news websites, are slower. The Fox News website, for instance, is based in New York, and so if you actually go there, you're seeing stuff before the power outage because they simply haven't been able to update it. But remember also, the internet was designed by the U.S. military to withstand a nuclear strike. It's built for this kind of system. Take a look at this screen here. The larger circles indicate exactly what the network looks like. Each of these is a network. So as, for instance, 2 or 3 of these become crippled or slowed down, the internet data simply reroutes through other portions. I can show you right now how the network is performing, and the green areas mean it's up. In this case, we're showing that Ontario— some servers in Ontario are down. Down here in New York is showing down. Overall, though, that's a lot of greens on the screen, which basically means the network is performing as it was intended to do, which is reroute data in the event of an emergency or a catastrophe or a situation like this.
Any other interesting dimensions to the story you've seen from the internet?
You know, one thing to watch for is as they start to spark up these power stations and return networks to the grid, that being power networks, watch for some glitches perhaps in that system. Remember that as these systems went down, computers, air conditioners, everything that draws a lot of power, as they went down, they were on, which of course implies as they come back up again and power is refed to them, they'll be on and immediately drawing information or drawing power from the network grid. What happens, of course, is, as you know, if you've got a number of lights in your house you turn on an air conditioner or a heater or an iron, you'll notice the dims dim a little bit. Basically looking at the same situation. As they turn on large areas, all sorts of appliances are going to come on at the same time. That could, and has in the past, tripped those very relays which may have been set up to prevent a power failure in the first place. So we might see smaller networks come up, trip, and then slowly come back on again. So the advice really is, if you're able to and your power is out and you're able to hear this, turn off the machines that are going to draw a lot of power. Heaters, air conditioners, computers, computer monitors. And then turn them on in sort of a— hopefully at random times, you know, and then we'll be able to stagger the growth up and it won't trip what happened in the first place.
