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DDoS Attack Halts Heating in Finland Amidst Winter (metropolitan.fi)
A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack halted heating distribution at least in two properties in the city of Lappeenranta, located in Eastern Finland. In both of these events, the attacks disabled the computers that were controlling heating in the buildings. An anonymous reader writes: Both of the buildings were managed by Valtia, the company which is in charge of managing the buildings overall operation and maintenance. According to Valtia CEO, Simo Ruonela, in both cases the systems that controlled the central heating and warm water circulation were disabled. In the city of Lappeenranta, there were at least two buildings whose systems were knocked down by the network attack. According to Rounela, the attack in Eastern Finland lasted from late October to Thursday -- the 3rd of November. The systems that were attacked tried to respond to the attack by rebooting the main control circuit. This was repeated over and over so that heating was never working.
I know it's cold in Finland this time of year, but the first day of winter is still a month and a half in the future.
This time last year, I had my boiler replaced. While shopping around for a new one, a number of companies attempted to flog me cloud-based heating solutions.
"You can control it from your mobile phone."
"It knows you've left the house and turns itself off."
"It can be made to learn when you're coming home, and to switch on so that the house is warm when you get in."
"You can have them installed in your elderly relatives' homes, and control their heating for them, remotely."
My first thought was, well, if I can control all this shit remotely, so could someone else. An intranet solution would've been cool, though.
1. Why are these infrastructure computers reachable from the Internet?
2. Why this system doesn't fail safe if the controller is taken down?
Yet another cautionary tale of IoT woe, but also some seemingly bad design...
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Why, oh why, do software engineers (or maybe just coders) allow external access to mission critical processes?
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
Sorry but if your heating system is 100% cloud based so that a DDOS attack or internet outage will stop heat control, then it was designed by the worlds biggest morons.
Cloud based is great for toys, for anything important it's 100% shit.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Turn off the heating in a critical office building to shut the office down. Even heating systems are critical in cold countries.
Even heating should be hardened and not available to Putin attack.
2007 Russian cyber attacks Estonia, blocking banking, government, newspaper headlines and Estonian Reform Party head quarters. This was after Russia tried and failed a propaganda attack during that years elections. Does that sound familiar? They failed to get their stooge into power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_cyberattacks_on_Estonia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_parliamentary_election,_2007
"The Centre Party, led by the mayor of Tallinn Edgar Savisaar, had been increasingly excluded from collaboration, since his open collaboration with Putin's United Russia party, real estate scandals in Tallinn,[1] and the Bronze Soldier controversy, considered as a deliberate attempt to split Estonian society by provoking the Russian minority.[2]"
Putin tried to get his puppet elected. The people rejected the Putin puppet, so Russia did widespread cyber attacks on the country. Latvia has electronic voting, it is at the biggest risk of a Putin hacker rigged election. Estonia is more aware about the risks. Finland is very glib, but they were once under Russian control and should be more careful.
Never underestimate the power of a Russian puppet leader to undermine the security of a country. Never underestimate a cyber attack on critical systems, or worse, election systems.
Someday, we'll figure out that it's not a good idea to subject critical infrastructure to Internet control.
They could've turned off the heating at a polling location in the United States. Everyone would be blaming Putin even if he didn't do it.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Default ought to return to my 80 year old, still working bimetallic thermostat, with no electronics. Never failed in 80 years.
Let a mechanical thermostat be the default control when the computer fails, regardless of why!
You don't really get global warming, do you?
With the attach a couple weeks ago, the more crap that doesn't but gets hooked up to the internet, WITHOUT PROPER SECURITY, it's only going to get worse.
The solution is simple. For some reason the people responsible don't take action. Maybe we are waiting for the big one? Like an explosion in a nuclear electricity facility?
GET. ALL. CRITICAL. INFRASTRUCTURE. SYSTEMS. OFF. THE. INTERNET.
To play the devils advocate.. what is the alternative? Leased lines and private networks?
Do you think Telco you pick one of those up from isn't going to provision it using same (mostly virtualized) infrastructure and management systems they use for Internet traffic? Do you really think their systems are any more secure?
I strongly believe any and all attempts at securing the network is both dangerous and counterproductive. It is dangerous because it sucks resources from the only thing that matters... securing *systems* and counterproductive because it essentially amounts to "castle defense" in the age of super sonic jet fighters.
If people connect their shit to the Internet with the understanding that it is both a hostile and unreliable environment and take precautions to guard against it (obviously these jokers did no such thing) such systems end up being better engineered and more secure over time vs. dolts with leased lines or private cables who never see an unsolicited byte or dropped packet and become complacent and less investment is subsequently made in engineering systems for reliability and security.
The alternative is when someone does hack a leased line or cut into dark fiber in anger all bets are off. This shouldn't be. Control systems don't have to be the joke that lies just behind most corporate firewalls. It takes investment to get there. Every dollar spent on private lines and DIY networks are dollars not spent on R&D into control systems that are more survivable in hostile environments.
Finnish winters are starting to resemble the summer, but unlike the summer, which was on Thursday this year, the winter is scheduled on Tuesday.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
I am an HVAC controls Technologist and the product we use used to have an unintentional DOS issue. If there was too much traffic on the controller's network port (including traffic not intended for it), the processor would spend all of its time responding to network interrupts and actual operation would grind to a halt. The fix was simple...the manufacturer made new firmware that would simply ignore network interrupts if the program scan rate got too low. Sure, the controller would quit communicating on the LAN but it was still accessible via rs-232/485.
These controllers have 32MHz processors, 2MB ram, and 10Mb half-duplex ethernet, and cost multiple thousands of dollars.
We are not talking about a remote control that is for some absurd reason controlling your local heating in the house.
We actually are talking about remotely distributed heat, hot water, steam, to heat the houses in question.
Otherwise the owners could simply fiddle with the controls I guess.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I'm sure that school that has their heating system controlled by an Amiga won't have this problem :P
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
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