Something Eriely Similar To WannaCry Happened Two Years Earlier

itman · Feb 10, 2018

*Offensive comment removed.

Description of the case

On Dec. 23, 2015, at about 13:00, a power outage occurred at western Ukraine’s local energy provider Prykarpattyaoblenergo. It cut the power to 80,000 customers for about six hours. During that time, costumers failed to report the outage, due to technical failures in the call center. Furthermore, it seems that multiple regional power companies in Ukraine were attacked simultaneously.

After analyzing the information obtained by researchers thus far, it is clear that cyber attacks were directly responsible for power outages in Ukraine.

From what has been revealed by now, it seems that the attackers used at least one malware for damaging the operational network servers and have demonstrated spreading capabilities inside the target network.

Penetrating the network

It seems now that the main malware component was embedded in a third-party HMI software used by the power companies. When the operators updated their software, they downloaded an infected file which contained the attacker’s malware. Once the malware was downloaded the attackers had persistency in the network due to a change they had made in one of the HMI files.

The attack execution

What’s most interesting about the attack is that current evidence and analysis indicate that the attackers interacted directly with the network during the attack itself, probably through a remote access port. It is known that the attackers used a corrupted version of a remote-access software that was installed in the operator network. By interacting with the network the attackers were able to send the relevant commands to the field devices and to time those commands to cause the attack.
Click to expand...

http://radiflow.com/the-ukrainian-outage/

Log in or Sign up

Something Eriely Similar To WannaCry Happened Two Years Earlier

itman Registered Member

Log in or Sign up

Something Eriely Similar To WannaCry Happened Two Years Earlier

itman Registered Member

Useful Searches