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CIA Claims Cyber Attackers Blacked Out Cities
Dotnaught writes to tell us InformationWeek is reporting that the CIA admitted today that recent power outages in multiple cities outside the United States are the result of cyberattacks. "We have information, from multiple regions outside the United States, of cyber intrusions into utilities, followed by extortion demands. We suspect, but cannot confirm, that some of these attackers had the benefit of inside knowledge. We have information that cyberattacks have been used to disrupt power equipment in several regions outside the United States. In at least one case, the disruption caused a power outage affecting multiple cities. We do not know who executed these attacks or why, but all involved intrusions through the Internet."
Am I the only one that thinks thats a really stupid thing to do?
... for US Federal elections. Coincidence?
Is there really any excuse of convenience that justifies connecting the nations major utilities to the internet?
At least if there is a firesale Justin Long and Bruce Willis will be there to save us. Coincidence that Mac Guy would be the one to save us? I think not.
I actually did skim the article, but I didn't see anything pertaining to when these attacks/outages happened or where (other than outside the US). Does anyone have an idea about what power outages they are refering to?
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
Now add the fact that the US Director of National Intelligence has indicated that he wants to obtain the ability to monitor all Internet traffic data:
Contrast this with a second Ars article from yesterday, where the US Federal Energy Regulation Commission has just approved new security regulations for the organizations (mostly private) that run the US electrical grid. Rather than blaming evil foreign hackers, Ars reports that:
This all just sounds like an excuse to install packet loggers everywhere.
(And it's not just the US authorities who want to lock down and control the Internet; the UK also recently indicated a desire to install censorship devices at the ISP level. Good luck with that.)
Quick, somebody call Jack Bauer, he'll know what to do!
I call BS on this one. I was in the US just two weeks ago. The airport was at security level 4 out of 5. I asked an officer what the threat was, and he told me that in the four years that he had been working there, the threat level had not budged from level 4. That means that there are effectively only two levels of threat: 4 and 5. This also means that the officers are authorized to perform 'checks' and other violations of the rights that I know Americans used to hold dear. This is a temporary situation, I understand, however the temporary situation has been in effect for over four years it seems! I believe that the CIA 'admitting' that the power outages are attacks are a way to drum up public support for more 'checks' and ways to survey the public. If they were real attacks then I doubt the CIA would make that public. I also doubt that the CIA would be the agency to do make that public. I don't subscribe to the many conspiracy theories that populate Reddit, but from the little that I did see in the US in the three days that I was there, things have changed since 1999 (last time I was there). People are now scared. People _want_ their government to invade their lives. That is scary. I was thinking of Winston Smith the whole time.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
That's ridiculous. Power and services don't just suddenly cu
Table-ized A.I.
That's why they invented out-of-band management tools long, long ago.
Given the nature of how the internet works, having a dial-up line to a management console (who then requires authentication) is much better for OOB management than using the Internet.
Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai
Microsoft, Linksys, Google, Yahoo
Am I the only one that thinks thats a really stupid thing to do?
It takes only a single breach. The story mentioned it may be an inside job, which means somebody may have put a single little link between the two systems, breaking the separation.
Table-ized A.I.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
Wardialers are to OOB management as portscanners are to internet-connected management.
Presuming that InformationWeek had their typical lame coverage here, a quick search found a much better article about this at Forbes (they even know to ask Bruce Schneier about it!) where they link to a nice background article about these SCADA systems.
1. There may be situations where the systems need to be remotely administered, and using the Internet is a much, much cheaper way to facilitate this than deploying a completely private network infrastructure just for this purpose, which probably isn't very practical (for both physical and financial reasons).
2. pr0n browsing. Actually here in Australia, the power generation company (at least in my state) does have it's own control network. It used to be Copper, but a while back they replaced it with fibre. They ended up with so much excess bandwidth that they wholesale it to companies. I assume they have their fibres separated from everyone else's.
Option 2 may cut into their profits a bit though
I haven't read TFA yet, but an attack from the Internet should *never* happen to something as important as this.
Where I work, we have an In-Confidence network and some Protected stuff. Each level is ONLY allowed to connect to ONE level lower and then only via approved security mechanisms. So the In-Confidence can access the (Unclassified) Internet, but the Protected stuff can't talk to the Internet at all. Actually in our case we don't bother connecting the Protected stuff even to our In-Confidence network.
I would assume a power control system would be much higher security than In-Confidence (that's pretty low - any decent business should be at least that level in reality), and thus not allowed to talk to the Unclassified Internet.
This of course is for Government networks. The US power companies (as are most in Australia) are privately owned, so they don't have to worry about such trivial things as security rules.
On a side note, I'm constantly amazed at the expectation of vendors and PHBs that we will automatically open up our network so that some stray vendor can remotely debug their dodgy application. Yea sure, we'll let you in from your totally unknown network that has only knows what security holes and stuff going on inside it to access our server(s) with elevated privileges. Especially when everyone working in our IT department has gone through a security clearance, and they have whoever they snagged off the street.
Actually I've just had a look at TFA, and it doesn't have any sort of details on what / where (not USA) / when (well vaguely - recently) / why (profit ???) / how these attacks occurred.
Ever stop to think
This information was released at a major security conference. If they wanted to just scare everyone they would have released this info more directly to the public rather than at a meeting of specialists who could see through a line of BS. And if they were really going for the fear factor they'd leak this on a monday or tuesday morning, not at 6pm on the friday before a long weekend. It sounds to me like they want to diminish any possible panic, not amp it up. Notice they're not blaming terrorists or enemies either; the strong implication is organized crime with some kind of inside connections. I tend to be pretty skeptical of CIA but based on the little info that is here I'm guessing they're not making this up, and they probably are hoping that letting people know who are responsible for computer security at more localized levels will make it more likely for them to trace the perps.
And if MS Windows is involved, then it escalates to willful negligence.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
From some articles it seems that the affected cities are from Central and South America, including some in Mexico.
My developers gave up on that a long time ago. Now, whenever the end user asks for live assistance, or in any one of a number of error conditions, we spawn off an ssh tunnel from the customer site to our mothership server, send the error/status report, and leave the thing open for three days.
Yeah, we snag customer care techs off the street, it's true. But your security-cleared IT personnel install whatever we ship as root if we tell them too in the readme. I'm not trying to scare or insult you or act macho. It's pathetic that we could arrange to expose the networks of dozens of Fortune 500 companies. But realistically, if someone calls up and can't figure out what our software did with their tax information, it's a lot quicker to tunnel in and look at the logs than it is to walk them through the myriad of possibilities on the phone.
Damn skippy. When I worked as a SCADA dev, we had one (1) machine connected to the internet, in a locked room. If you wanted to move something from there to a machine on the LAN, you did it by burning CDs, and the culture (rather than just the 'procedures') was genuinely against installing anything that wasn't absolutely necessary. Nobody outside of IT had admin access to their desktops.
That was our dev house procedures though. As you say, it all falls apart on the production systems. Once customers started using commodity Windows boxes, it was all over. We found one production box where the night watchman had hacksawed off the padlock on the back, opened it up and installed a sound card so that he could play games on it, presumably by plugging an optical drive in for the duration. It was pwoned by his warez and needed a brain wipe. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
We are into lying, like, you know... BIG TIME!
We also have secret wars, illegal financing, blackmail, brainwashing, manipulation of the press, assassination, extra-judicial surveillance, detention and punishment. What'd I leave out? Oh, yeah! "Harsh Interrogation". That's just "torture" between us. But I digress. The mainline business is lying - it's like the life-blood of the other operations.
Now trust us on this one: The Internet is extremely dangerous.
Really. You'll have to get on board with us over this one, as we begin to curtail the Internet. I know it's a useful tool for communication. But we'll all have to live with censorship, spying and blockage, to stop an Internet 9/11.
It is most important that you associate political speech and action on the Internet with suspicious motive - even with predilection for terror. We will develop this theme over the next few years, so stay tuned - and stay safe.
Trust us. Would we lie to you?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."