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Nuclear Plants Leak Critical Alerts In Unencrypted Pager Messages (arstechnica.com)
mdsolar quotes a report from Ars Technica: A surprisingly large number of critical infrastructure participants -- including chemical manufacturers, nuclear and electric plants, defense contractors, building operators and chip makers -- rely on unsecured wireless pagers to automate their industrial control systems. According to a new report, this practice opens them to malicious hacks and espionage. Earlier this year, researchers from security firm Trend Micro collected more than 54 million pages over a four-month span using low-cost hardware. In some cases, the messages alerted recipients to unsafe conditions affecting mission-critical infrastructure as they were detected. A heating, venting, and air-conditioning system, for instance, used an e-mail-to-pager gateway to alert a hospital to a potentially dangerous level of sewage water. Meanwhile, a supervisory and control data acquisition system belonging to one of the world's biggest chemical companies sent a page containing a complete "stack dump" of one of its devices. Other unencrypted alerts sent by or to "several nuclear plants scattered among different states" included:
-Reduced pumping flow rate
-Water leak, steam leak, radiant coolant service leak, electrohydraulic control oil leak
-Fire accidents in an unrestricted area and in an administration building
-Loss of redundancy
-People requiring off-site medical attention
-A control rod losing its position indication due to a data fault
-Nuclear contamination without personal damage Trend Micro researchers wrote in their report titled "Leaking Beeps: Unencrypted Pager Messages in Industrial Environments": "We were surprised to see unencrypted pages coming from industrial sectors like nuclear power plants, substations, power generation plants, chemical plants, defense contractors, semiconductor and commercial manufacturers, and HVAC. These unencrypted pager messages are a valuable source of passive intelligence, the gathering of information that is unintentionally leaked by networked or connected organizations. Taken together, threat actors can do heavy reconnaissance on targets by making sense of the acquired information through paging messages. Though we are not well-versed with the terms and information used in some of the sectors in our research, we were able to determine what the pages mean, including how attackers would make use of them in an elaborate targeted attack or how industry competitors would take advantage of such information. The power generation sector is overseen by regulating bodies like the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC). The NERC can impose significant fines on companies that violate critical infrastructure protection requirements, such as ensuring that communications are encrypted. Other similar regulations also exist for the chemical manufacturing sector."
-Reduced pumping flow rate
-Water leak, steam leak, radiant coolant service leak, electrohydraulic control oil leak
-Fire accidents in an unrestricted area and in an administration building
-Loss of redundancy
-People requiring off-site medical attention
-A control rod losing its position indication due to a data fault
-Nuclear contamination without personal damage Trend Micro researchers wrote in their report titled "Leaking Beeps: Unencrypted Pager Messages in Industrial Environments": "We were surprised to see unencrypted pages coming from industrial sectors like nuclear power plants, substations, power generation plants, chemical plants, defense contractors, semiconductor and commercial manufacturers, and HVAC. These unencrypted pager messages are a valuable source of passive intelligence, the gathering of information that is unintentionally leaked by networked or connected organizations. Taken together, threat actors can do heavy reconnaissance on targets by making sense of the acquired information through paging messages. Though we are not well-versed with the terms and information used in some of the sectors in our research, we were able to determine what the pages mean, including how attackers would make use of them in an elaborate targeted attack or how industry competitors would take advantage of such information. The power generation sector is overseen by regulating bodies like the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC). The NERC can impose significant fines on companies that violate critical infrastructure protection requirements, such as ensuring that communications are encrypted. Other similar regulations also exist for the chemical manufacturing sector."
Smithers! fire that Simpson fellow!
Into the trash it goes.
No clickbait headlines here, no siree Bob.
Other than the fact that these are just alerting an operator to a potential condition that they need to verify before acting on?
There's no automated responses, just waking someone up.
...strikes again. Except in extremely rare situations (the stack dump), which was of questionable usefulness to an attacker, most of this stuff is fairly benign.
Pagers still have superior range, penetration through walls, and resistance to electrical noise compared to other technologies. If you think pager messages are bad you should see some of the wireless industrial control stuff out there. Electric grids don't use encryption because the encryption delay can be the difference between an overload or a switching command. Most industrial control stuff is horribly insecure. (eg SCADA, automotive CANs, etc)
If the messages are unencrypted, are they not authenticated either? What's to stop someone spoofing messages that induce the operators to shut the plant down? Or even worse to take some course of action that damages the plant with the wrong action, or by ignoring warnings they think were cancelled?
I'm sure the regulations say they should check, but we know how often those are ignored in this industry.
When I get paged from work, the first thing I do is check independent monitoring systems to see if the problem that's reported is actually occurring since False alarms sometimes happen. I don't just blindly reboot a server because I get a page saying that it has a problem, I make sure that problem exists before I "fix" it.
I'd like to think that nuclear plant workers do the same and don't vent steam from the reactor just because their pager said that pressure is high, I'd hope that they verify from multiple independent sources.
About the worst you could do with unencrypted alerts is change them - change "steam pressure elevated" to "steam pressure critical" or "steam pressure normal" or "you got p0wned". But if you have the ability to re-write plain text alert messages, even if they are encrypted you'll have the ability to block them or corrupt them and prevent important messages from getting through.
"Core temperature normal."
"Vent radioactive gas." YES / NO?
"Venting prevents explosion."
"Vent radioactive gas." YES / NO?
I can't speak for chemical plants etc, but I do currently work at a nuclear power plant as an engineer.
Pagers are not used for any control function of the plant. Any digital control system is scrutinized for cyber security.
The only use of pagers is as part of a call out system, so that in case of a plant event, people are alerted to come in to resolve the issue. This is rarely used. As part of this system they also call people on the phone. No specific plant information is ever transmitted as part of this call, just the classification of the plant event. I know this because I function as a communicator in the Emergency Response Organization.
I wish people would stop spreading lies about nukes. There are certainly some negative aspects of nuclear power. If you don't think it is worth it, then fine that is your opinion, and feel free to defend it in a rational, intellectually honest way. That people have to make stuff up to justify that opinion is telling about how strong their position is.
What the fuck do they want them to do? Get a non-descript pager message telling them to go find a computer and log into their encrypted 'alert portal' to securely view the message? Yeah, because that's exactly the sort of shit they should waste their time on when getting an alert like that. You know what they'd probably do in that case? Call someone at the plant. And have an insecure conversation that could be eavesdropped on. Because, you know, security is more important than a swift response to a fucking nuclear reactor malfunction.
I myself work in telecom. When critical infrastructure mucks up, we get paged. Nowadays it means we get text messages on our mobiles. And yes, there is some pretty important information in those sometimes. Being a security-conscious organization, we considered the potential leak of information and less informative messages. We concluded that being immediately made aware of exactly what the problem was, in a business where downtime is to be kept to less than a thousandth of a percent, was more important than a well-funded or equipped bad actor being able to determine minor facts about our infrastructure. I should hope business which handle nuclear or toxic materials, or those which are responsible for keeping the lights on and keeping people alive would have similar priorities.
And seriously, who are you talking about securing this shit against? The guy who stole the on-call tech's pager? The gov agent with a stingray? A foreign power who's eavesdropping on the pager network (which would be dumb, as it would be a lot of effort for terribly little gain)? The terrists (who aren't that adept anyways)? You want to know the REAL threat to your security? Look at your HR dept. I GUARANTEE the lowliest drone in your organization can, within 3 months of employment, scurry off with more sensitive data than someone could get by mining your pager messages for years.
So, security panic, clickbait, yadda yadda. This is really a back-asswards non-story.
LIke "Thousands killed by solar power"? Which, by the way, is true. Getting killed falling off a roof while installing solar panels is a more common way of dying than from a nuclear accident (total casualties in the USA due to civilian nuclear power: zero. Note the word "civilian". There was a military tet reactor that fit into a bathrub that managed to kill three people when they failed to follow procedure doing maintenance))....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"