Posted on 03/15/2018 5:11:42 PM PDT by Navy Patriot
The Trump administration accused Russia on Thursday of engineering a series of cyberattacks that targeted American and European nuclear power plants and water and electric systems, and could have sabotaged or shut power plants off at will.
United States officials and private security firms saw the attacks as a signal by Moscow that it could disrupt the West’s critical facilities in the event of a conflict.
They said the strikes accelerated in late 2015, at the same time the Russian interference in the American election was underway. The attackers successfully had compromised some operators in North America and Europe by spring 2017, after President Trump was inaugurated.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
MI6, too.
This is the kind of thing(s) that careful observers have noted have been going on for TWENTY YEARS. Yes, since the mid-late 90’s. We are blitheringly and negligently insane not to have developed defenses and countermeasures for this activity at least 15 years ago.
If it can be done it will be done. FIX IT!
We are living 1984
The NYT used to believe the USSR was the greatest nation on earth.
So called “Navy Patriot”, your devotion to KGB Putin is sick.
I suspect this happens all the time and that we do it right back. This is kinda like submarines pinging each other or Russian fighter jets approaching a US carrier.
Wait, who was President then?
My work in the utility industry was with an integrated gas/electric/water utility in the Midwest. I worked full time in research and analytics while attending law school. I came away from that experience very unimpressed with the IT sophistication of that organization - and it included nuclear generation assets. Unless something has changed in the last 20 years, they are sitting ducks.
When I first started working at the utility it was 1992 - and the first thing I asked for was a file layout for the main customer file (database). It took about a week, and then a large interoffice mail envelope (with the string fastener) arrived with a photocopy of a green-bar paper printout of the COBOL 01 level layout for the customer file. Up in one corner of the printout was the date 12/10/1977. I called the folks who sent it to me and said: “there must be a mistake - this is dated 1977, this can’t possibly be the correct, current master file layout.” The response was: “oh no, that’s it.”
I’m thinking something like that is still going on there, and that means we should be very afraid that some extremely skilled Russsian hackers have our infrastructure number.
Well if your goal is to create chaos, how better? Imagine taking down part of the power grid on election night, for example. What would we do?
I thought the last time I heard this, it was North Koreans, renowned as unsurpassed hackers, and currency counterfeiters.
Every sub component of every industrial machine I work on these days has an IP address for Ethernet control with my programs. One machine has hundreds of servo drives, vfd’s, displays, switches, and safety circuits which are all remotely accessed anywhere a comm port exists. Russians not neefed.
We should tell russia - you screw with one power plant and Moscow is glass.
Your example may be dated but it is still relevant because the mindset has not changed in a major way. Utilities still operate in a regulated environment and under resource constraints (who doesn’t?) but more than other industries I’ve seen, use those factors to justify cutting corners and increasing exposure to threats.
Here’s a more recent example - utilities use SCADA systems to monitor remote assets and the PC is the most cost-effective platform for running that software. While it is possible to create secure isolated sub-nets and enforce rigorous network security measures, it’s a lot easier to just run off-the-shelf stuff and rely on the same measures that get hacked every day. The literature is full of cases where this happens all the time, but fortunately no intrusions have yet been severe enough to raise real havoc. I for one don’t feel lucky.
No controls going to any reactor systems should be connected to the internet. Every remote terminal that connects to the plant in any way must be monitored by heavily armed physical security and biometric ID. No wireless anywhere and every inch of cable must be hardened and have a tamper alarm.
This is elementary engineering, people!
Exactly, and it's nothing new, to wit,
From the 22nd paragraph of the article:
"The United States sometimes does the same thing. It bored deeply into Iran’s infrastructure before the 2015 nuclear accord, placing digital “implants” in systems that would enable it to bring down power grids, command-and-control systems and other infrastructure in case a conflict broke out. The operation was code-named “Nitro Zeus,” and its revelation made clear that getting into the critical infrastructure of adversaries is now a standard element of preparing for possible conflict."
What is new is the laughable pretense that the Russians initiated this activity against the US.
are we any better?
https://www.wired.com/2016/03/inside-cunning-unprecedented-hack-ukraines-power-grid/
I wish we could believe our intelligence agencies.
But we can’t.
Unfortunately this might be true. And they have squandered all their credibility.
That is if they don't raid a house down the street from the kid they want with forty guys, two armored vehicles, and an Apache flying cover, when the kid is actually at school
I take this to mean that we caught them in these networks and have uprooted and blocked them back out. Otherwise that means they actually executed some kind of attack which would be really stupid for a variety of reasons.
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