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Forget Stuxnet: Banking Trojans Attacking Power Plants
New submitter PLAR writes: Everyone's worried about the next Stuxnet sabotaging the power grid, but a security researcher says there's been a spike in traditional banking Trojan attacks against plant floor networks. The malware poses as legitimate ICS/SCADA software updates from Siemens, GE and Advantech. Kyle Wilhoit, the researcher who discovered the attacks, says the attackers appear to be after credentials and other financial information, so it looks like pure cybercrime, not nation-state activity.
How do you distinguish the two?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
There are lots of stories of how bad Diebold is in upgrades and that most ATMs are running on WinXP and how they can be made to dispense cash with remote exploits. Though it all requires physical access to the usb ports inside the machine first.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
SCADA and the like are the worst things to have available on an accessible network. Vendors never update their software, everything's insecure by default, etc.
I've worked in environments like this, and some of the equipment is just not possible to secure without leaving it on its own network. It makes maintenance a nightmare -- sneakernetting patches, software updates, AV signatures, etc. I know an air gap isn't a guarantee of security, but it at least prevents dumb things like drive by downloads on someone's computer affecting production equipment.
Working with vendors of some of this stuff is equally bad...most of them deny a problem exists. And even if they acknowledge a problem, they won't lift a finger to fix it because they just have to say it's secure if installed as per our instructions. I've seen lots of software for control systems, etc. with 15 or 20 year old software libraries gluing everything together. (Using the 15 year old version now, I mean.) The vendor knows they're one of a handful of firms providing stuff like this, and they know that companies don't care about information security anyway. (One example of this from outside of the manufacturing industry -- I was integrating a very specific peripheral for a customer, and the vendor absolutely refused to digitally sign the Windows drivers, rendering it nearly impossible to install on 64-bit Windows. A lot of people might say "that's what you get with closed source," but open source libraries and other code have their problems as well.
The malware poses as legitimate ICS/SCADA software updates from Siemens, GE and Advantech.
Okay, but considering we're dealing with control systems, why the hell isn't somebody verifying the updates are valid? The distribution channel and validation apparently is the cause here. I still advocate air gaps between Intranet and Internet connectivity in SCADA environments and the controls on updates of any software should be verified as to authenticity prior to deployment. It should be easy for somebody to contact GE and ask for the MD5 for the update or check it out on their portal first.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
SCADA was rarely required to run outside the building. Most SCADA systems I've seen are isolated just because there's no need for them to be given access to anything else than the content it will run. For this reason SCADA systems have not been exposed and their team most probably lacks the security experience. MS, Apple and Linux all suffered when they first got hooked up to the internet. Today these company have tones of experience and react fairly quickly to security holes.
As for power plants, most of them (if not all) are still operated manually using hard buttons. The only connection there is to the plant is connection to the monitoring of sensors.
Patty the daytime hooker FTW!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Any company that has a SCADA system that is allowed to automatically install any sort of update needs new management. I write software for industrial SCADA systems (many of them nuclear, but some not) and absolutely NONE of them have any form of automatic update enabled. That goes for the operating system platform, even anti-virus packages (when they are used) must be manually updated after the update has been tested in a sandbox lab system. Even a well intentioned update may disrupt a SCADA system's operation, so why would anyone in their right mind allow a SCADA system or the operating system it runs on, or any other software running on the same machine automatically update itself? Sorry, but that's just insane.. At best, SCADA systems should have a one-way data flow (preferably on a serial link with the receive line physically CUT) but none of them should accept input from outside their physically controlled environments.
Except for toys and things like that.
Please, if anyone speaks of "cutting the transmit/receive wire" and "air gaps" assuming that all things will work out are being extremely naive. Those concepts worked in the late 80's and 90's; they do not now and lead many to false and erroneous assumptions.
Accept the fact that interconnectedness is the norm and change your conventions accordingly.
Just who in their right mind connects a ICS/SCADA unit directly to the Internet. Go and read up on VPN – virtual private network.