Half of Brazil was plunged in darkness from 10:15 PM Tuesday for four-six hours, ostensibly because a storm shorted one (or in some reports, three) of five transmission lines at the Itaipu hydroelectic power station that straddles the border between Paraguay and Brazil. The outage affected 50 million people in Brazil. The station also supplies 90% of Paraguay’s power so that Paraguay was blacked out for 15 minutes. 

The company in charge, Furnas, which is owned by the Brazilian state, denies that there was any problem in the transmission from Itaipu to the national grid and dismissed the reports as speculative, though they were affirmed by several other officials

More at AP:

“Despite Furnas’s statement, the ministry’s secretary, Marcio Zimmerman, speculated that an unspecified “adverse meteorological condition” set off a “domino effect” through the grid.

Itaipu has an output of 14,000 megawatts, which supplies 20 percent of the energy needs of Brazil, Latin America’s most economically active nation. All of that was off-line overnight.

The blackout occurred two nights after the US television network broadcast a report in which unidentified former US national security officials claimed massive power outages in Brazil in 2005 and 2007 were caused by cyber hackers attacking control systems.”

This is the CBS report  mentioned in the AP article. For those concerned this is a cybercrime of some sort, here’s a ranking of countries by their contribution to malware – malicious software that takes over your computer to send out spam or anything else your attacker might fancy (Note this is not a report on cybercrime in general, to which China’s contribution is minimal, but just a ranking of where malware comes from. In cybercrime overall, the US accounts for over 60% – more later..)

1. Americans and other non-British English speakers (more than 30% of world’s total, with the Americans contributing about 23%)

2. China (30 %)

3. Brazil (14.2%)

4. Russia (4.1 %)

Two technologically strong countries that use English, the UK and India, both ranked low, jointly contributing only 1.3%, with most of that from the UK, according to this Forbes report. According to the report, Russian security guru, Eugene Kaspersky, explains this as due to cultural differences. A Businessweek-Symantec report from September 7, 2007 puts India’s contribution at 3%. (the report can be found in a more user friendly format here at engimasoftware).