- Oil-and-Gas APT Pivots to U.S. Power Plants
January 10, 2020
A known APT group with ties to the Iran-linked APT33, dubbed Magnallium, has expanded its targeting from the global oil-and-gas industry to specifically include electric companies in North America. That’s according to a report from Dragos, released Thursday, which noted that the discovery is part of a broader trend in which cybercriminals focused on critical infrastructure are branching ...
- ICS Cyberwarfare: The Latest Threat to America’s Power Grid
November 20, 2019
The modern world is dependent on electricity, and the United States is no exception. I remember the notorious blackouts that affected the eastern U.S. and Canada in August 2003. The duration of the mass power outage lasted anywhere between several hours and a week depending on where you were. I was in Hamilton, Canada, and ...
- 17 US utility firms targeted by mysterious state-sponsored group
September 24, 2019
A mysterious state-sponsored hacking group has targeted at least 17 US utility firms with phishing emails for a five-month period between April 5 and August 29, Proofpoint reported today. The purpose of these attacks was to infect employees at US utility firms with LookBack, a remote access trojan with an extensive set of features. While no formal ...
- Cyber-security incident at US power grid entity linked to unpatched firewalls
September 9, 2019
A cyber-security incident that impacted a US power grid entity earlier this year was not as dangerous as initially thought, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) said last week. In a report highlighting the “lessons learned” from a past incident, NERC said hackers repeatedly caused firewalls to reboot for about ten hours, on March 5, ...
- ACSC helps power energy sector’s cybersecurity capabilities
September 4, 2019
The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) has plugged into energy sector organisations and government agencies to help power their cybersecurity capabilities. The nationwide program — which started in November 2018 – aims to improve the energy industry’s cyber threat resilience and responses. So far, the ACSC has provided cybersecurity incident response and exercise training, information exchange sessions on operational ...
- AMEO ‘concerned’ about nation-state attacks on power grids
August 22, 2019
“For the energy sectors and critical infrastructure sectors, particularly around electricity, we are concerned about nation-state actors,” says Tim Daly, chief security officer (CSO) for the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO). “Nation-states are looking to have capability and implants that are persistent within critical organisations,” he told the Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit in Sydney ...
- Adwind Remote Access Trojan Hits Utilities Sector
August 19, 2019
Attackers are targeting entities from the utility industry with the Adwind Remote Access Trojan (RAT) malware via a malspam campaign that uses URL redirection to malicious payloads. Adwind (also known as jRAT, AlienSpy, JSocket, and Sockrat) is distributed by its developers to threat actors under a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) model and it is capable of evading detection by most major anti-malware ...
- How Threat Intelligence Helps the Energy Sector Fight Cyberespionage
August 13, 2019
When it comes to cyber threats, some industries have it harder than others. Few are as heavily targeted by sophisticated cyberattacks as the energy sector. Over the last decade, state-sponsored hacking groups have routinely targeted utility networks and other energy providers for the purposes of espionage and disruption. And according to the latest research, advanced persistent threat (APT) ...
- US wants to isolate power grids with ‘retro’ technology to limit cyber-attacks
July 2, 2019
The US is very close to improving power grid security by mandating the use of “retro” (analog, manual) technologies on US power grids as a defensive measure against foreign cyber-attacks that could bring down power distribution as a result. The idea is to use “retro” technology to isolate the grid’s most important control systems, to limit ...
- U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid
June 15, 2019
The United States is stepping up digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid in a warning to President Vladimir V. Putin and a demonstration of how the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively, current and former government officials said. In interviews over the past three months, the officials described the previously ...
- Researchers Link ‘Sharpshooter’ Cyber Attacks to North Korean Hackers
March 4, 2019
Security researchers have finally, with “high confidence,” linked a previously discovered global cyber espionage campaign targeting critical infrastructure around the world to a North Korean APT hacking group. Thanks to the new evidence collected by researchers after analyzing a command-and-control (C2) server involved in the espionage campaign and seized by law enforcement. Dubbed Operation Sharpshooter, the cyber espionage ...
- South African Power Firm Eskom Fails To Secure Customer Data
February 6, 2019
A security researcher resorted to a public tweet about a serious data breach involving customer data, after a South African electricity provider ignored all other pleas to resolve the leak. Security researcher Devin Stokes issued the public tweet to Eskom, which is South Africa’s state-owned electricity company. The fact that Eskom, which supplies 95 percent of the electricity ...
- GreyEnergy’s overlap with Zebrocy
January 24, 2019
In October 2018, ESET published a report describing a set of activity they called GreyEnergy, which is believed to be a successor to BlackEnergy group. BlackEnergy (a.k.a. Sandworm) is best known, among other things, for having been involved in attacks against Ukrainian energy facilities in 2015, which led to power outages. Like its predecessor, GreyEnergy malware has ...
- Electric Vehicle Charging Stations Open to IoT Attacks
December 14, 2018
Flaws could allow an attacker to stop or start a home charging station, or even change the current in order to start a fire. Given that creating proof-of-concept (PoC) cyberattacks for the Internet of Things (IoT) is essentially like shooting fish in a barrel these days, perhaps it’s not exactly surprising that a new niche category ...
- Operation Sharpshooter Uses Fileless Malware to Attack Global Infrastructure
December 12, 2018
The McAfee Advanced Threat Research team detected a malware campaign dubbed Operation Sharpshooter which attacked nuclear, defense, energy, and financial targets from all over the world. As detailed by McAfee’s research team, the campaign dubbed “Operation Sharpshooter” makes use of an in-memory essential to download and execute a second stage payload named Rising Sun. Moreover, the Rising Sun implant ...
- Saipem servers suffer cyber attack in Middle East
December 10, 2018
Italian oil services company Saipem (SPMI.MI) said it had identified a cyber attack out of India on Monday that had primarily affected its servers in the Middle East. “We are collecting all the elements useful for assessing the impact on our infrastructures and the actions to be taken to restore normal activities,” the firm said in ...
- Cloud, cars and IoT could change grid cybersecurity
November 6, 2018
The proliferation of connected devices including electric cars could provide grid operators with an operational view of cybersecurity threats and change the way the grid is secured, said Karen Evans, assistant secretary of the Energy Department’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response. While experts generally consider the internet of things to be a risky ...
- Hackers obtain nuclear power plant plans in France
November 2, 2018
Thousands of sensitive documents pertaining to nuclear power plants, prisons and tram networks have been stolen from the servers of a French company in a cyberattack, German and French media have reported Friday. The data illegally accessed from the French company Ingerop back in June amounted to more than 65 gigabytes, according to reports by German ...
- Utilities, Energy Sector Attacked Mainly Via IT, Not ICS
November 1, 2018
Stealing administrative credentials to carry out months-long spy campaigns is a top threat. While industrial control systems (ICS) are the most talked-about when it comes to cyberattacks against energy and utilities firms, most attacks actually take aim at the enterprise IT networks used by these organizations, rather than critical infrastructure itself. The Vectra 2018 Spotlight Report on Energy and ...
- Industry backs Norway’s AI powerhouse project
October 2, 2018
Norway is stepping up its efforts in the rapidly evolving and increasingly commercial artificial intelligence (AI) sector. Participants in the latest programme want to reduce the country’s reliance on oil revenues by tapping into AI opportunities in its growing technology sector. Norway has traditionally played a junior role in the context of Nordic technology development, investment and ...