Irate Unix Administrator Admits Trying To Sabotage California Power GridIrate Unix Administrator Admits Trying To Sabotage California Power Grid

A contract Unix system administrator pleaded guilty to trying to disrupt a data center where he was employed in Folsom, Calif., by hammering the safety glass of an emergency power shut-off, then pushing the shut-down button.

The case drew the attention of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force in Sacramento, Calif., because it involved an attempt to shut down a data center of the California Independent System Operator Corp., an electrical power consortium chartered by the state to manage the statewide energy grid.

The FBI reported April 18 that it had arrested Lonnie Charles Denison, 32, and charged him with destruction of an energy facility, a violation of the U.S. Code, Section 1366 (b). Denison's case came to court last Friday, where he pleaded guilty to the charge. Sentencing is set for Feb. 29.

The incident occurred April 15 and disabled the data center for two hours. No blackouts occurred because of the interruption, but Jim McIntosh, the agency's director of grid operations, told investigators that if the outage had happened in the morning, the "results would have been far more severe." The criminal complaint added that electric consumers in the western United States would have experienced disruption in their electrical supply.

The incident occurred on a Sunday night when demand for electricity was low, and the data center, which powers trading to maintain the California power supply, wasn't needed to maintain supplies around the state.

Denison had been engaged in a dispute with his employer and had lost system access privileges when he took the action against the data center's power supply. He was tracked down via a review of security camera film and through an e-mail he sent to a co-worker the next day that was interpreted as containing a bomb threat, according to investigators.

"Hey, at one point I respected you ... you have a new kid. So this is only because of him. Get out before the timer expires. Not long now. Take care," he wrote in the message, according to reports in the Sacramento Bee and San Francisco Chronicle. The message resulted in the data center being evacuated from noon to about 6 p.m. April 16.

Denison was working as an employee of Science Application International Corp. in San Diego, a firm that supplies contract workers to the ISO Corp.

The ISO "brokers power distribution to the grid" and tells member suppliers how much of their power has been consumed on the grid, said Carlo Tiu, senor systems analyst with Northern California Power Agency, a member of the grid, while attending Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco in November.

In addition to buying power to meet demand, the ISO also schedules supplies coming from such sources as the city of Palo Alto, which runs an electrical generating plant, the city of Santa Clara and the city of Alameda, as well as the Port of Oakland, Tiu said in an interview.

Data center operations were switched to a back-up site during the outage, and 20 data center staffers brought the downed site back on line at a cost to ISO of $14,000, according to the criminal complaint.

Denison faces a fine of up to $250,000 and up to five years in jail.