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Hackers Broke Into Brazil Power Grid Operator's Website Last Thursday
An anonymous reader writes "A week ago, 60 Minutes had a story (we picked it up too) claiming that hackers had caused power outages in Brazil. While this assertion is now believed to be in error, hackers were inspired by the story actually to do what was claimed. Last Thursday, they broke into ONS, the operator of the grid (Google translation; Portuguese original). DarkReading has specific details on the SQL injection vulnerabilities the hackers probably used."
the hackers invaded the _website_, the ONS network of computers that actually control the system is private and not connect to the internet.
> One would think critical power networks would be close systems.
Read the article. What was broken into was the "corporate network" of the organization that runs the system. The control system was not broken into and in fact appears to be protected by an air gap.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
FTA...
"ONS was notified last week of this problem. They've confirmed that, indeed, its Website was hacked. It claims to have fixed the SQL injection problems and that there was no danger because there was no connection between its Website network and back-end control network."
Keeping a few connected computers off the larger WAN is easy enough. But as those computer grow in number it can become more difficult to prevent someone, somewhere from opening up ssh, ftp, rdp, or some other connection-type. Then the whole LAN becomes susceptible to the evils of WAN baddies.
And don't even get me started on the lack of physical security on 'secure' systems. If you can touch it, it's insecure.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
And, two days after the blackout, the systems analyst Maycon Vitali, 23, revealed in the blog "Hack'n'roll" to a login page of the ONS revealed error in the validation data. The flaw could allow a hacker to send command to the database and find sensitive data from ONS.
The failure was published in the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo on Monday (16).
This is exactly why full disclosure is not good.
How so? If two days after the vulnerabilty was exploited causing millions of dollars of damage they *still* don't fix it, then the public has the right to know how much the security of the systems sucks. It may be the only way to prevent this from happening again.
This is ridiculous. You can easily hack into their corporate website, but there is no way hackers got into the Brazilian power grid management system, because there is no such automated system in the first place! The central agency controlling the grid Operador Nacional do Sistema (ONS) operates the center by calling their buddies on generating station over private phone lines. Unless you are a very good voice impersonator and know all the necessary protocols, you will not get very far. That's when lack of technology is a plus.
Today hackers gained access to my bank account and increased the ballance to 100 millions dollars without alerting authorities.
Actually that didn't happen. My bank account is perfectly secure. There are no hackers anywhere that are smart enough to do such a thing.
We have the best government that money can buy.
Or everybody's fired!
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Original xkcd reference. http://xkcd.com/327/
-- SouNerd.com
Well, first of all, the 60 minutes episode about blackouts in 2005 and 2007 provides absolutely no proof or other data about those blackouts being caused by hackers, except for two anonymous sources that suspect it was.
Second, there was no breach in the grid network, at least not know so far. What happened was that the ONS (the Brazilian electric grid operator) website was hacked.
-- SouNerd.com
Here in Chile a guy reported the government about a serious bug on their outsourcing website (chilecompra.cl), they ignored him for months, and he made the bug public (you were able to know your competition's offer to the government just by changing a GET parameter).
He was condemned by a court for breaking the law, more info here (spanish)
What kind of action should one take in those cases? Has this happened before in other countries?