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Hackers Have Penetrated Energy Grid, Symantec Warns (fortune.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: Hackers have been burrowing their way inside the critical infrastructure of energy and other companies in the U.S. and elsewhere, warns cybersecurity giant Symantec. In a new report, Symantec claims that the threat of cyberattack-induced power outages in the west has elevated from a theoretical concern to a legitimate one in recent months. "We're talking about activity we're seeing on actual operational networks that control the actual power grid," Eric Chien, technical director of security technology and response at Symantec, told Fortune on a call. Reports surfaced over the summer of hackers targeting staff at nuclear energy facilities with phishing attacks, designed to steal login credentials or install malware on machines. The extent of the campaign as well as the question of whether the attackers had breached operational IT networks, rather than merely administrative ones, was unclear at the time. Symantec is now erasing all doubt. "There are no more technical hurdles for them to cause some sort of disruption," Chien said of the hackers. "All that's left is really motivation." Symantec detailed its findings in a report released Wednesday morning. The paper tracks the exploits of a hacker group that Symantec has dubbed DragonFly 2.0, an outfit that the company says it has linked to an earlier series of attacks perpetrated between 2011 and 2014 by a group it dubbed DragonFly.
did n
Now Symantec will just sell them their AV crap!
electrical grids to switch to McAfee security products.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
I would need to see this confirmed by a competent, reliable source.
... and start doing some actual security.
Despite the breathless reporting, there is no "energy grid" that can be hacked. Individual servers and routers can be hacked. Unprotected SCADA systems can be hacked. But it would take far more than this to bring down the electric system in the US. It's not contiguous or synchronous. It's not impervious either (see 2003 blackout) but it doesn't work the way it's described here.
There is one good point made that companies often don't well protect their control systems and there are paths between corporate networks and HMIs or historians. But that is an easily solved problem and one NERC has addressed already.
Then this is what you get!
You know you're in trouble when you need Symantec and Microsoft to secure critical infrastructure.
Oh well... You better put some panels on your roof if you want reliability and real security..
"There are no more technical hurdles for them to cause some sort of disruption,"
But maybe, they're here to help. IT COULD HAPPEN !!! :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Otherwise known as the IOT.
Any power outages caused by the recent CME eruption from our sun might scare people into purchasing 'protection'.
http://spaceweather.com/
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
While there are a few North Koreans hacking the grid, it's mostly been Russian state hackers and Chinese state hackers. In point of fact, we made a deal with China to hold off on that, so now it's mostly just the Russians.
Source: various agencies. No, not linking it.
On the plus side, residential and commercial building solar and wind power systems are mostly not hacked.
Far more risk factor from fires, quakes, floods, and storms, actually.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I've argued in favor of decentralized off-grid solar power because centralized power is vulnerable to attack. People either don't grasp what I mean or write it off as paranoia but this is a prime example of the vulnerability that centralized power systems create.
Be it a tree or hacker, centralized power systems a vulnerable to attack. (We shouldn't have pissed off the trees.)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
According to http://cybersquirrel1.com/ there have been 1049 successful grid attacks YTD by squirrels, although raccoons pose a significant threat. Grid operators track outage causes, and human attacks are paltry compared to natural causes. A ton of strategically placed sunflower seeds could be bought for about the cost of 20 Symantec licenses. I for one quake in fear of our bushy tailed nemesis.
Just the washing instructions on life's rich tapestry
Our government is behind this in order to make everyone afraid and give up more rights and to justify their cyber warfare initiatives.
i need more than just Symantec saying so, since they themselves verge on malware.
1. Isn't it true that this sort of thing isn't exactly new? That we could do it to any number of countries, too, if we wanted to, right now?
2. If this is actually more than just FUD, then why isn't, for instance Cal ISO issuing a press release about it? I'd think they'd know before anyone else would.
After the break, barber claims long hair causes cancer.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I wonder if this is the result of them issuing bad SSL certs?
Symantec Mis-issuing 30,000 SSL Certificates
Just sayin'...
Don't you mean "nemeses"? There's more than one you know.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
This gets modded funny, but I'd like to see the security freaks respond to this someday. Hey security guy, let's say I'm a power company exec --Why should I pay you twice what the guys battling the squirrels get? How about I fire you and hire two more squirrel fighters...
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
A PLC is like a little computer that controls and reads data from hardware. In the electrical generation world think of it as the brain that reads sensors and controls
and also feeds the information back to the control room to be monitored. In many power companies I've seen these mission critical devices on the same LAN as the receptionist who likes to download emoticons onto her computer and clicks links in emails. Ideally these devices should be on a private network of their own, because they often have very little security protection. Modbus, the protocol used by many of those devices often has no user authentication to read and write values. This means a hacker could spoof values and damage hardware or cause other mayhem. For example a hacker could remotely open the valves in a hydroelectric intake and drain all the water from the reservior while also burning out the generators. All from the receptionists compromised machine.
How about no, because you don't win a fight against squirrels by trying to kill all of them. Sure, you try to mitigate their ability to get at the parts that will fry them, but that surface area nationwide is so large that it probably isn't very economical. Random outages caused by fried squirrels are a pain in the butt, but it is the coordinated outages, which could be accompanied by other terrorist attacks, which are the real concern.
Everyone's known since Stuxnet was identified in late 2010, that these companies were vulnerable to serious attacks. So for 7 years they've done either nothing or not enough, to secure themselves. I think they're putting the public at risk, therefore, they should be in trouble for negligence. Hopefully nobody's harmed by their negligence.
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First off, what in the hell would Symantec AV stuff be doing on infrastructure-critical machines that can affect said infrastructure (versus just looking at data points)? Secondly, this isn't something that would be announced by a company unless it was trying to sell a product. They would responsibly notify the infrastructure officials and have them take control of the situation, IF IT EXISTED.
This reeks of a ploy to induce fear and sell their amazing product that cane "detect things like this" magically. What complete bullshit. We know hackers, anyway. They would have started fucking with things to make sure they actually had control by now. I haven't heard of any fuckings-with-of-components. I see the voltage and frequency of the incoming mains varying as predicted and as applicable every day. A little 30-dollar device can show you that. Basically, it ain't happening and this is Facebook-like/Twitter-like bullshit that I can't believe people are buying into. If Symantec is releasing this information, they should be cut up and destroyed immediately.