Leicester streetlights take ransomware attack personally, shine on 24/7 It's become somewhat cliché in cybersecurity reporting to speculate whether an organization will have the resources to "keep the lights on" after an attack. But the opposite turns out to be true with Leicester City Council following its March ransomware incident. Nearly two months after INC Ransom's attack hit the English …
I was going to ask, if this will be examined in retrospect and will show a decrease in motor vehicle collections, or break-ins, or some other event?
Like a decrease in colds and flu during the early days of Covid-19 as everyone washed their hands like their life depended upon it. Or fitness levels rose during lockdown as people took advantage of their 1h per day outside.
Once upon a time street lights had photocells to control when they turned themselves on or off. Presumably that was considered too complicated.
OK, a bit simplistic but how hard would it be to have a photocell to fall back on if contact was lost to the central control.
I think one of the reasons they went for centralised control is it just takes one pigeon with a good aim to knock the photocell out of operation. The cost of having some poor berk going around cleaning the photocells was deemed too high. But as a backup they are a better option then leaving them on all the time even if a small number of them are covered in crap (or leaves).
Or they could link the street lights in groups and have a system whereby the reading given by the majority of photocells determines the outcome (on/off) for the whole group? That would to an extent avoid the single point of failure inherent in both a single photocell and a centralised control system (yes, this is a form of centralised control but complete failure would affect far fewer lights, and there could be some redundancy built into the control module.).
You are all missing the point. Most councils use outsourced software. I doubt many (if any) have in-house coding skills. They can request whatever options they want, but I expect they get what the outsourced agency can be arsed to give them. Nothing in Brexit Britain works properly. But at least they can see the pot holes all night.
This does beg the question of whether, having failed to protect their data once, they have failed to protect it a second time by not paying the ransom. Whilst I'm not a fan of paying ransomware, and it might not work, they had an option to protect the data and chose not to.
I'm sure everyone will be fully recompensed. 50p off their council tax, paid for by a new £50 a year bin charge.
These days they not only do that but also have mm-radar to detect presence under them and communicate it to adjacent lights
Such designs go to 10% brightness when not needed and light up as a car or human moves under them
By all accounts the number of burglaries in areas where they're in use has tailed off dramatically, but that's not what they were intended to do - and that intention has backfired
Streetlighting is a useful way of soaking up overnight excess power capacity rather than letting generation kit go cold. When councils started turning off lights overnight (or other similiar tactics to reduce power bills), the tariffs were changed to increase their charges
"I think one of the reasons they went for centralised control is it just takes one pigeon with a good aim to knock the photocell out of operation"
The photocell doesn't have to look at the sky. It reads light, doesn't matter from where. If calibrated (just give a little twist to that sensibility knob, will ya?), one could even point it sideways or to the sidewalk.
At least 1 photocell operated one near us, not knocked out by pigeons, but by tree leaf shading.
In a while* it will be in "Summer mode" where sufficient leaf cover on the tree above the receptor for the light controller to regard it as "dark" and streetlight is also on in the daytime.
* currently insufficient leaf cover for light to be on all day, as will be a while before tree it is beneath gets a decent leafy canopy, tree still in Spring phase of relatively few leaves "out" & those that are "out" are not at peak size yet.
> photocells are a better way to control for local conditions - e.g. they would make the lights come on during a dark and wet early evening
Yes; and rare events like our recent Solar Eclipse (even if Dizzy mayn't like it). While the longest dusk-level period was maybe 10 minutes, suddenly-darkened drivers can do some mayhem that quickly. There's also global volcanic clouds, and last summer's fires in Canada.
But those photocells cost money: $13-$30 web-price, so easily $100 on government contract. Leave it out and that boodle helps pay for the networking infrastructure.
There is also, depending on the installation, electricity billing implications.
In certain cases, the electricity company bills the relevant local for street lights according to a formula that has a daily hours in use as one of the inputs. So, controlling the lights centrally makes it easy.
Don't think they bill street lights by actual consumption at the lamp post. So, a lamp may have failed, but it will still be in the charge. May be one day...
I suspect that there may be a remote fault detection system in operation that will alert the council to failed lights without the local residents having to bother, hence the remote access. In addition, some street lights, at least in the UK, have sockets for authorised people to connect to the power supply, and that may also require monitoring. (There is a car charging point on a streetlamp near my home.). If the council wants to save money on its electricity bills, it may also decide to turn some lights off or down at specific times. It is probably also cheaper to have a remote control system than light sensors on each streetlamp.
There's always (always in the sense of: long before internet) been remote control (ripple control) of street lights, at least in this part of the world. The lights have been switched based on a central light sensor and schedules (e.g. reduced street lighting after midnight). And for maintenance, once in a while someone patrolled the streets to detect faulty lamps, or preemptive exchange based on expected lifetime - whichever is more efficient. I do see some advantages of connecting street lights to the web: online detection of faulty lights, more flexible control of individual lights (instead of hard-wiring to a handful of groups). But is it really worthwhile?
A lot of the control is also down to out-of-hours switching for reducing power consumption.
What is infuriating is that most of the LED streetlights are not saving any power over the LPS or HPS as they are simply using the same KWHr but are far brighter. That most are now insanely bright to the point that it is disrupting sleep patterns and wildlife is an irrelevance.
The light pollution is also beyond belief as they lights are so bright even though it is all pointing down what is reflected back up is causing massive light domes over any built up areas.
Not only are they brighter, but the old Sodium lamps used to have a very narrow-band spectrum, which could be easily filtered out by astronomers. Now, they use phosphor-coated "white" LEDs, which have a very broad spectrum, impossible to filter.
As someone who was into astronomy I have pretty much given up because of the light dome over Leicester to the north then Magna Park (Massive warehouse complex) to the south west.
In the space of 2 years the sky went from being not bad to appalling, all down to the very bright LEDs and no way to filter.
I may have missed it but I didn't notice anything that said the lights were connected to the Internet.
They had to reset ALL their systems as part of the clean-up and for some unknown (or un-disclosed) reason the lighting control system didn't work properly as a result.
"The default mode for faults is that the lights stay on to ensure that roads are not left completely unlit and become a safety concern"
You city folk and you quant little ways.
Somehow many villages seem to cope quite well. Sure we may have them on a junction, maybe a few extra in the centre....but even then they often go off at 1am.
Maybe if you spent a bit more time shagging your relatives*, rather than stabby stabby, shooty shooty, you wouldn't need them.
*In before the obvious reply.
"Hopefully they are LED"
These would be the newfangled led lights that create a pool of white brilliance directly beneath the lamp, but which fades away to nothing within a few meters, and certainly long before you reach the next streetlight? The result being interspersed patches of light and darkness that make it bloody difficult to see pedestrians unless they're directly under a light. Cheaper and cleaner they may be, but they're nowhere near as good as the old sodium lights that spread, well, light in all directions.
>>they're nowhere near as good as the old sodium lights that spread, well, light in all directions.
When we moved in to our current abode, at night we didn't need indoor lights because of the light pollution from LPS lamps.
These got migrated to HPS and the pollution reduced slightly (luminaire design) and changed colour (went from sodium orange to sodium pink).
Now they are LED lamps and we need to use our indoor lamps at night! how very dare they! by here, the pooling effect isn't a great problem - noticeably less bright between the lights but not enough to make it impossible to see pedestrians - pretty much how I remember the part of Tyneside, that my gran lived in, which had mercury discharge lamps instead of LPS (blue white, rather similar to the LEDs)
What are we talking about here? I can't see them being WIFI or internet/network connected so it must be some kind of scada system broadcasting a signal probably down the power lines and the system connected to that is out of service. The question now becomes what sort of contract do they have where they can't just get this replaced or reinstalled? Why has this taken this amount of time? It's now been over a month.
I've had a bit of experience with Smart Streetlights. You put a smart controller into the standard photocell socket on the top of the light unit which then communicates on top of the electricity radio metering network back to base. It allows you to time schedule on/off, scheduled dimming [dimming lights at 3am etc saves money] and tells you how long the lamp has illuminated, its power use [useful for billing and energy management] and if something is wrong. Note this is designed for LED lights.
Now you can do it properly with the big industry players like Itron. It is not cheap but they very, very focussed on security.
Or you can do it cheap with some chinese junk and get owned.
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