British Supercomputer ARCHER hit by a Cyber Attack

guest · May 14, 2020

British Supercomputer ARCHER hit by a Cyber Attack
May 13, 2020
https://www.cybersecurity-insiders.com/british-supercomputer-archer-hit-by-a-cyber-attack/

British Supercomputer ARCHER which is used for academic research by Universities operating in the UK has been hit by a cyber attack early this week forcing the admin to reset all user passwords and SSH keys.

According to the details available to Cybersecurity Insiders, ARCHER fell victim to security exploitation which is now being investigated by the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC)- a cyber arm of GCHQ.
For this reason, the high-performance computing machine running on 4920 nodes of Xeon CPU remained unavailable to users since Tuesday.

A source from ‘The Register’ said that apart from ARCHER, several individual servers working across Europe have also fallen prey to a cyberattack which appears to be sophisticated and well-targeted.
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TheRegister: Danger zone! Brit research supercomputer ARCHER's login nodes exploited in cyber-attack, admins reset passwords and SSH keys

In a statement posted to the project's status page on Wednesday [...]
Updated to add
A University of Edinburgh spokesperson has been in touch to say:

[...] On the 11th May 2020 our technology partners were notified of a potential issue that indicated some user accounts may have been misused to gain unauthorised access to the service.
Investigations by our technical teams confirmed that a small number of user accounts had been affected so the decision was taken to disable access to allow further work to confirm the extent of the issue.

There is currently nothing to suggest that any research, client or personal data has been impacted by this issue and all relevant stakeholders are being updated.
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guest · May 15, 2020

UK Supercomputing Service ARCHER Still Offline After Monday Attack
May 15, 2020
https://www.darkreading.com/attacks...ll-offline-after-monday-attack/d/d-id/1337838

Security and IT administrators at ARCHER, the UK's national supercomputing service, are still working on restoring services more than four days after cyberattackers forced it offline.

A statement on the ARCHER website Friday noted that staffers are working on diagnosing the attack and understanding its full scope. All existing ARCHER passwords and SSH keys for secure authentication are being changed and are no longer valid, the statement said.
When service eventually resumes, all users will be required to use two-factor authentication — comprised of a password and an SSH key with passphrase — to access it.

"It is imperative that you do not reuse a previously used password or SSH key with a passphrase," ARCHER said.
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Service Status
Friday 15th May 1600

We would like to provide an update regarding the recent ARCHER Security Incident.
The diagnostic work continues on ARCHER and we will provide a further update on Monday 18th May.
As previously mentioned, all of the existing ARCHER passwords and SSH keys will be rewritten and will no longer be valid on ARCHER. [...]
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Minimalist · May 16, 2020

Supercomputers hacked across Europe to mine cryptocurrency

Multiple supercomputers across Europe have been infected this week with cryptocurrency mining malware and have shut down to investigate the intrusions.

Security incidents have been reported in the UK, Germany, and Switzerland, while a similar intrusion is rumored to have also happened at a high-performance computing center located in Spain.
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https://www.zdnet.com/article/supercomputers-hacked-across-europe-to-mine-cryptocurrency/

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