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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.
The issue is that "winter" doesn't mean the same thing to everyone. I used to argue with my (Finnish) wife about this for a while, but Finns typically refer to something which translates as "thermal winter" (terminen talvi) which starts on the first day the average temperature for an area consistently drops below 0C
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.
The temperature in Helsinki is below freezing and isn't expected to get above freezing even during the daytime highs for at least a week. That's close enough to winter for me, no matter what the divide the year into four equal seasons says.
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.
Yes, this is the most important part of the story. Who cares if some dipshit HVAC system failed due to a DDOS attack, disabling heat for buildings in sub-freezing temperatures. What we should really be discussing is this completely unacceptable disregard for when winter actually starts!
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Seriously, there is absolutely NO good that comes from wiring up every little thing to the internet. What's the purpose behind connecting this to the open internet?
Call me a Luddite and get these things off of the open internet. These idiots deserve what happens to them and those same idiots should be held accountable when someone dies from their ineptitude.
I believe you mean 22 in Freedom Units.
Let a mechanical thermostat be the default control when the computer fails, regardless of why!