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Western Energy Companies Under Sabotage Threat
An anonymous reader writes In a post published Monday, Symantec writes that western countries including the U.S., Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Turkey, and Poland are currently the victims of an ongoing cyberespionage campaign. The group behind the operation, called Dragonfly by Symantec, originally targeted aviation and defense companies as early as 2011, but in early 2013, they shifted their focus to energy firms. They use a variety of malware tools, including remote access trojans (RATs) and operate during Eastern European business hours. Symantec compares them to Stuxnet except that "Dragonfly appears to have a much broader focus with espionage and persistent access as its current objective with sabotage as an optional capability if required."
I read The group behind the operation, called Dragonfly by Symantec as that Symantec had a group called Dragonfly, and they were performing the espionage.
And my thought processes didn't toss that out as being unreasonable.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
"...the group mostly worked between Monday and Friday, with activity mainly concentrated in a nine-hour period that corresponded to a 9am to 6pm working day in the UTC +4 time zone."
Which government has working days like that? Is it the Russians?
All rites reversed 2010
I would have thought some of these should be airgapped for security reasons by design? Is it so hard to go to work these days that you have to hook it up to the outside?
People no longer have an expectation of privacy, according to Mark Zuckerberg.
Corporations are people, according to recent laws.
Ergo please stop whining, what goes around comes around, much like an enrichment centrifuge PLC : ).
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
To bear the blame if things go wrong. Oh, you want quality? Sorry, in the modern everything-must-be-done-yesterday-at-no-cost IT sector, quality is usually not an option. There's no market for quality.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
There is an obvious solution
Korma: Good
More probably Russia. The first rule of superpowers- spy on everyone, all the time. Presumably they had to do this themselves because the NSA doesn't bother spying on them (and Russia would certainly have backdoored the NSA's computers and data collection streams).
America patented this handy attack vector during the cold war. the CIA once destroyed a gas pipeline in 1982 by hacking malicious controls software into a system purchased by them from canada.The pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines and valves was programmed to go haywire, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds.
Again, the US did this in 2010 in collusion with Israeli Mossad, who were at the time busy with bomb attacks against key nuclear scientists in Iran. Stuxnet was meant to sabotage the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. The worm worked by first causing an infected Iranian IR-1 centrifuge to increase from its normal operating speed of 1,064 hertz to 1,410 hertz, causing repeated stress and ultimately failure.
now the cows have come home. America is finding itself on the receiving end of increasingly sophisticated attacks against its 60 year old reactors and control systems by proxy. smaller western nations use the same GE technology and concepts while arguably being 'under the radar' enough to avoid major investigation into penetrations that would result in increased security of these systems by the US, or so i suspect the prevailing theory would be. It is no longer a matter of if, but when we as a country will take a seat for one of our famous 'teachable moments'
Good people go to bed earlier.
It's Russia because
- UTC+4 is one time-zone east of moscow;
- it shifted to energy supplying firms with the beginning of the crisis in Ukraine (where Russia's gas delivieries are considered as the its only trump)
- it's either Russia or China in general
I work for a "western energy company."
We have dozens of sites, and a half dozen huge ones as they're power stations.
We have 3 network techs and 2 security people that are constantly traveling hundreds of miles to reach them all. But somehow we have 5 Sharepoint people... (God I hate management)
No, there is no 'easy' solution to security and people like you are why it's harder than it should be. Security is an ongoing process, not something you just install. The minute you forget about that little detail is the minute that you get pawned.
That's the easy part.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
you know it's working by the buzz your production machinery makes on the other side of the office wall. well, almost more or a roar....
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Hmmm... Did anyone just say why don't we use this opportunity of reliance upon centralized power and the weakness thereof to get rid of the energy cartels and rely on decentralized power instead, thus making our nations stronger, more independent and resilient to both attacks and natural disasters ? Just food for thought on a day that Solar Power just got greener and not to mention cheaper http://www.geek.com/science/se... The fact that power companies are being "attacked" is old news - The right path to take in the light of these "attacks" is one of energy self reliance. That means "self powering" each building and furthermore securing such installations from infograbbing / controlling entities looking out for their own profits with no real concern for your needs or finances.
MS, ALS, Aphasia ? http://globability.org - Me http://einarpetersen.com
... about the ones Symantec doesn't know about. :)
Also, I don't remember Symantec doing anything useful since like, forever. I remember them for purchasing Norton Utilities and turning them into a bloated mess. Should we trust them on this, or is their marketing department manufacturing a threat?
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
Are we not worthy of even a tiny mention at the footnote? I feel like I live somewhere that has no influence on the global stage any more. That can't be right. Oh, wait ..
Having real staff watch over a site is now been replaced with cheap networking. That network is the free 'internet' and a few skilled staff can watch over many sites 24/7. ... ie an onsite design issue.
Staff numbers could be cut, fewer real experts would be needed.
The networks are not hardened or unique to a plant or site. Too much consumer grade software and networking open to the outside world was used.
This is not news, was not unexpected and is an ongoing issue due to cost cuts and staffing
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
No it hasn't. It gets lots of code audits, which eliminate buffer overflows and the like, but does nothing to prevent properly operating malicious software. You want "trusted" computing for security against internal threats, and OpenBSD doesn't do it. Something like RHEL with SELinux properly configured and working, would offer better resilience to the kinds of attacks in question.
OpenBSD was no more immune to the OpenSSL heartbleed bug than any other platform.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
autoplay.
NSA operations are spelt with capitals.
Oh, you mean western countries including the U.S., Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Turkey, and Poland are currently the victims of an ongoing cyberespionage campaign, launched by somebody apart from the NSA as well?
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse