Ransomware Against the Machine: How Adversaries are Learning to Disrupt Industrial Production by Targeting IT and OT

Since at least 2017, there has been a significant increase in public disclosures of ransomware incidents impacting industrial production and critical infrastructure organizations. Well-known ransomware families like WannaCry, LockerGoga, MegaCortex, Ryuk, Maze, and now SNAKEHOSE (a.k.a. Snake / Ekans), have Read More …

Assessment of Ransomware Event at U.S. Pipeline Operator

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) reported on 18 February 2020 on a ransomware incident impacting a natural gas compression facility at an unidentified U.S. pipeline operator. The ransomware event impacted both IT and ICS assets by causing Read More …

EKANS Ransomware and ICS Operations

EKANS ransomware emerged in mid-December 2019, and Dragos published a private report to Dragos WorldView Threat Intelligence customers early January 2020. While relatively straightforward as a ransomware sample in terms of encrypting files and displaying a ransom note, EKANS featured Read More …

Fake Smart Factory Honeypot Highlights New Attack Threats

A honeypot set up to observe the current security landscape in smart manufacturing systems observed numerous threats—including cryptomining malware and ransomware—in just a few months, highlighting the new threats that industrial control systems (ICS) face with increased exposure to the Read More …

Oil-and-Gas APT Pivots to U.S. Power Plants

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 Read More …

ICS Cyberwarfare: The Latest Threat to America’s Power Grid

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 Read More …

White Hat Hackers Get the Chance to Break Industrial Control System Security in PWN2OWN 2020

From enterprise applications and web browsers to mobile and IoT devices, hacking competition Pwn2Own has added another focus: industrial control system (ICS) and its associated protocols. Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), the bug bounty program behind Pwn2Own, has long been Read More …

Uncovering IoT Threats in the Cybercrime Underground

Amid the growth of the internet of things (IoT), manufacturers and integrators are testing the limits of how the technology can be applied, as seen in how new forms of connected devices are hitting the market. Some applications play critical Read More …

Unpatchable security flaw found in popular SoC boards

Security researchers have discovered an unpatchable security flaw in a popular brand of system-on-chip (SoC) boardsmanufactured by Xilinx. The vulnerable component is Xilinx’s Zynq UltraScale+ brand, which includes system-on-chip (SoC), multi-processor system-on-chip (MPSoC), and radio frequency system-on-chip (RFSoC) products used inside automotive, Read More …