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.

Comments

Re:This is what I meant.

[blindseer]

I've argued in favor of decentralized off-grid solar power because centralized power is vulnerable to attack.

It seems every time solar is brought up there is a mention of a "smart grid" to address issues of this thing called "night" that keeps solar collectors from providing 24/7 power. So, which is it? Do we get cheap solar energy from a "smart grid" or do we have expensive decentralized power?

If you want energy that is cheap, reliable, and decentralized then solar power cannot make any significant portion of the grid. Solar is only cheap if it is connected, and that means there's some centralized utility. If you take solar off the grid then you need storage, and that costs money.

I've argued in favor of decentralized off-grid solar power because centralized power is vulnerable to attack.

I live in the US Midwest, and we have a lot of "attacks" on the power grid. It was quite interesting to work the late shift at a call center in the middle of a rainstorm when a nearby lightning strike took out the grid power. We sat in the dark for a few seconds until the backup diesel generators started up. If that call center had decentralized solar power then the lightning strike would not have taken out the power, but that's because we'd have been running on the diesel generators since sundown.

I'm not too concerned about attacks on the power grid since we get them all the time and people have the means to deal with them. If a hacker wants to shut down a grid for a while then what does that mean in the end? Not much really.

I remember some idiot in California tried shooting up a large transformer with a rifle and was almost successful in creating a pretty big blackout. It was only because the guy goofed and missed out on cutting all the control wires for diverting power that he was not successful in making the substation go up in sparks and flames. Of course you then had some US senators call for more gun control (because in California the gun ban didn't work so we have to ban them again) and to armor up all substations (because utility prices aren't high enough already).

How do you protect solar panels from an attack? Wouldn't an idiot with a rifle be even more successful in attacking solar panels than a coal, nuclear, or natural gas power plant? I mean we can (and do) put a nuclear power plant in a big concrete dome to protect it from attack but we can't do that to solar panels. What of a hail storm? Wouldn't that turn your precious decentralized solar panels into a worthless (and toxic) busted up mess? Without a tie to the grid then how are these people supposed to get power until the solar panels are repaired? I know the answer, on site diesel generators, kind of like how we deal with grid outages now.

I'm sure that there's a lot of things we could do to secure our electrical supply. I'm also sure that solar power isn't one of those things.