"I didn't do it, nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything."
Posted on 12/20/2014 11:49:41 AM PST by Ray76
A German federal agency has acknowledged in a report Wednesday that a cyberattack caused physical damage to an iron plant in the country. It was a rare admission by a government tying a cyber action to actual physical destruction.
The attackers gained access to an unnamed plant’s office network through a targeted malicious email and were ultimately able to cross over into the production network. The plant’s control systems were breached which “resulted in an incident where a furnace could not be shut down in the regular way and the furnace was in an undefined condition which resulted in massive damage to the whole system,” according to the report, called the IT Security Situation in Germany in 2014.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.wsj.com ...
https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/BSI/Publikationen/Lageberichte/Lagebericht2014.pdf?__blob=publicationFile
"I didn't do it, nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything."
What's really shocking is how little we've actually spent to get ready, and how unprepared we actually are.
Really? How hard is it to complete isolate your production subnet from your business subnet?
I guess they will be thinking about this now....
Next target: nuclear plant control system.
1) World economy seems to be a bit iffy. Unemployment, Inflation, Oil prices, Gold reserves -- we've all seen the stories. If some big 2008-like crash happens sometime soon, I don't think anyone will be totally shocked.
2) Cyber attacks against things like our power grid are a real concern. It could be devastating and we are just not well protected.
Now join them together -- the world economy takes a big dip (not because of a conspiracy, just because dips happen), and THEN North Korea, or China, or Russia, or Iran, or whomever, decides to take down our power grid.
That'll hurt.
In this case the attack was carried out against a private facility. Its workers are probably well educated in the area of making steel; but they are not very likely to be security experts. How much time and money would it take to do a complete security audit in a plant with a continuous production cycle? And then some changes would have to be made which, most certainly, will interfere with the process that workers are used to. In retrospect, that was necessary - but nobody can predict such an attack in advance. That's what insurance is for - to take care of extremely rare events that aren't worth protecting against, on average.
Fat boy is being emboldened by our passivity. It’s never a good idea to give in to tyrants.
CC
I bet this one was RUSSIA
With millions of lines of code written over decades by tens of thousands of code monkeys and wires and wireless going everywhere, who's really in charge of anything?
I'm talking about our power grid and about our military installations. We are not as prepared as we should be. I know a little bit about this.
What the hell is so hard about keeping networks separate?
this is the kind of crap that can get out of control ....sending things spiraling to a place no one wants to go ....
“The attackers gained access to an unnamed plant’s office network through a targeted malicious email and were ultimately able to cross over into the production network.”
Shades of Battlestar Galactica!! (new series)
I’m sure it probably seemed like a good idea at the time to interconnect these two systems.
(Since they wrote “ultimately,” I’m probably over-simplifying a complicated piece of hacking.)
Of course, there is also the question of being able to remotely start up a furnace when the plant was unmanned as well. Another example of German engineering genius, I’m sure.
(Don’t read German, so I’m not sure if this was the case. If the production area WAS manned, it’s actually worse since humans would have been present but were inhibited from stopping the process and preventing the damage.)
Probably just as well these smart people don’t have nuclear weapons.
Being in the manufacturing business myself...
Many motion control systems now are controlled and monitored by ethernet to the engineering computers. I guarantee there was no super secret break in but some fool on his computer opening an infected email via some low level drone in the office. Even if the email network is 100% isolated some of those new back doors are nasty buggers that will install themselves on USB sticks.
When I was an employee at a large manufacturing shop an infected PLM computer system that was traced directly to the company accountant who had come in early to watch and download porn.
Wait until they hit our fragile grid...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.