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Hackers Have Infiltrated the US Power Grid's Control Networks (lasvegassun.com)
davidwr writes: A security researcher and the Associated Press are reporting that hackers have infiltrated many of the United States' power grid networks. "About a dozen times in the last decade, sophisticated foreign hackers have gained enough remote access to control the operations networks that keep the lights on, according to top experts who spoke only on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the subject matter." Exfiltrated data included engineering plans and other non-public information that could aid an attacker later, as well as account credentials. Multiple companies were affected, but one of the more notable ones was the energy provider Calpine. "Circumstantial evidence such as snippets of Persian comments in the code helped investigators conclude that Iran was the source of the attacks. Calpine didn't know its information had been compromised until it was informed by Cylance, Kerr said."
The US? I think you mean Israel and the US. When we found Hebrew in the code it certainly didn't come from Jewish Israelis but when we find Persian in there it's definitely the Iranians.
The USA has its infrastructure, military, and so much of its business hooked up to and dependent on the internet, you'd think it'd be a priority to make it more secure and stable. Instead, the NSA are doing their best to undermine web security and leave the USA open to attack. What are top secret hacking tools and techniques that only govts. have today are available to corporations and criminal gangs the next and the public/hackers thereafter. We need a more secure, private internet. No backdoors, no unpatched zero-day exploits, no offensive tools to get into the wrong hands, and an end to the cyber-weapons arms race that the USA has started.
One of my questions is, if it could be penetrated so deeply, why hasn't the grid been fucked over by someone by now?
Is it that the "control networks" are less vulnerable than they're made out to be, and that as it turns out a telnet session from someplace isn't enough to actually do any serious sabotage?
The "hackers" involved lack the know-how and expertise to do anything serious (maybe combined with it being hard to use these networks to do anything serious)?
$evil_nations are putting this in their back pocket for some later date when they really need it, like when El Presidente Cruz decides to start carpet bombing Iran over nuclear agreement issues or something. This seems compelling, but then again, all security vulnerabilities seem to have something of a shelf-life -- old equipment eventually gets replaced, software ultimately gets updated, networks change, etc -- the hack you thought you have may not be there when you need it, so why wait to hit the button?
Anonymous so called "experts" and all these examples read like a plot from the TV show "24" lead me to a hypothesis that this story is complete and utter BS or more likely propaganda to increase some governmental budget that benefits from cyberwar funding.
This is EXACTLY what this is.
Power companies may have exposed some of their automation equipment inadvertently, but in general they totally understand the risks here and are taking steps to be careful. They usually don't use internet control to stuff anyway, given the internet's propensity to not be operational when there are power issues. I'd bet that some monitoring happens over internet connectivity, but I'll be willing to bet this is behind reasonable levels of encryption and it doesn't really matter to the safe operation of the system, only the efficient operation of it.
Rest assured that, at least in North America, your electric providers don't have their preverbal pants down network wise. The internet, at least locally, is not very reliable so the power distributors have their own networks and back channel routes they use to manage their distribution networks.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
This aligns with the one system that I was involved in setting up. A former client of mine was running (and probably still runs as far as I know) a couple of power plants in Central California. The control systems were built by Honeywell. For a small, single turbine plant there were 5 servers. 2 masters, 2 slaves / reporting servers and 1 witness.
Both masters, 1 slave and the witness server were on a private network without internet access. 1 slave was in the DMZ with a uni-directional connection from the secondary master that wrote out reporting data. There was a VPN connection (over satellite because the plants were out in the middle of no where farm country) back to the company's main office. The VPN connected the company office to the DMZ and the reporting server so that people in the main office could see the output of the plant.
Nothing in the setup allowed settings to be changed over the internet. Everything within the plant was run on a dedicated IP network that was air gaped from the internet. The only server that was connected to the firewall was the slave / reporting server. It had 2 NICs. So I suppose in fantasy crazy TV land, someone could have hacked the firewall, hopped into the DMZ, compromised the slave and jumped into the control server where they would have been able to... do nothing, because it was the redundant server that would only have been active if the primary failed.
Keep in mind I set that network up in 2005 for a small, single turbine power plant that generated power by burning green waste (yard trimmings, etc.) I think it is reasonable to assume that 'real' power plants that power thousands of homes and businesses are at least as secure. In my situation, Honeywell told me how to do it. I did not make it up. The vendor had the solution, I was just there to handle the network and VPN.
Now that's an interesting test idea... Send out your own phishing E-mails and see who clicked on them..
Personally, where I work, all external attachments are removed from any inbound Emails and all attachments from inside are scanned before they are allowed to be sent. Also, all web browsing happens within an isolated virtual machine that is hard coded to only transit corporate's proxy/filters regardless of if you are inside or outside the network. The way you transfer stuff is though an external file transfer server that requires that you login and encrypts the data in transit. It too is able to scan just about everything... Pain in the butt, but effective.
I'm all for trusting folks to do the right thing and train them what that is, but I'm also for making sure they cannot do anything stupid if there is a reasonable way to prevent it.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101