Russian hackers suspected in recent Ukrainian power outage

A Ukrainian power outage in late December is now suspected to be the result of a cyberattack, making the blackout the first ever caused by malware. American officials are currently investigating Russian hackers for their alleged involvement in the scheme, in which at least three different power stations were compromised. Tens of thousands of people were left without power for several hours after the computers used to control the national grid were infected with the BlackEnergy Trojan malware, and many security experts have expressed concern over the implications of this recent attack.

While 2015 exposed major problems in the digital infrastructure of companies across a variety of industries, few of these data breaches resulted in physical consequences (though of course, having your credit card information compromised is serious enough in and of itself). But now, this latest hack has once again raised red flags around the issue of digitized warfare, with repercussions that may be more far-reaching than ever before.

“[The attack is] a milestone because we’ve definitely seen targeted destructive events against energy before — oil firms, for instance — but never the event which causes the blackout,” John Hultquist, head of security firm iSIGHT’s cyber espionage intelligence told Ars Technica. “It’s the major scenario we’ve all been concerned about for so long.”

Ukrainian officials believe that a Russian group known as SandWorm is behind the malware attack, as the particular virus used is one that the hackers have been known to employ in the past.

American officials, for their part, are carrying out their own inquiry of the events that led up to the attack, presumably to prevent a similar incident from occurring in the U.S. One anonymous agent told the Washington Post that certain questions were being raised about the hack, such as, “What was the process that led up to that? Did we see any key indicators ahead of time?”

Although experts like Michael Assante at the SANS Institute, a cyber-training organization, say the attack was of “low to moderate sophistication,” the incident could still be a worrisome sign of things to come. President Obama has noted previously that the American electrical grid could be vulnerable to attack, and noted, “In other countries cyber attacks have plunged entire cities into darkness.”

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from Planet GS via John Jason Fallows on Inoreader http://ift.tt/1Z9IzhD
Lulu Chang