- Npower withdraws mobile app after hackers steal personal details
February 27, 2021
Npower has permanently withdrawn its mobile app after hackers used it to access its customers’ personal details, including the sort codes and the last four digits of their bank accounts. The hack, which cybersecurity experts said left the firm’s customers “wide open to fraud”, is understood to have taken place around the start of February. The company ...
- Florida: Hacker Changed Chemical Levels at Oldsmar’s Water Treatment Plant
February 8, 2021
Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said at a news conference Monday there were two intrusions, hours apart. The first one happened at 8 a.m., when a plant operator noticed someone remotely accessing the system he was monitoring, which controls chemicals and other plant operations. But he didn’t think much of it, according to the sheriff, because ...
- Eletrobras, Copel energy companies hit by ransomware attacks
February 5, 2021
Centrais Eletricas Brasileiras (Eletrobras) and Companhia Paranaense de Energia (Copel), two major electric utilities companies in Brazil have announced that they suffered ransomware attacks over the past week. State-controlled, both are key players in the country. Copel being the largest in the state of Paraná while Eletrobras is the largest power utility company in Latin America ...
- Netwalker ransomware hits Pakistan’s largest private power utility
September 8, 2020
K-Electric, the sole electricity provider for Karachi, Pakistan, has suffered a Netwalker ransomware attack that led to the disruption of billing and online services. K-Electric is Pakistan’s largest power supplier, serving 2.5 million customers and employing over 10 thousand people. Starting yesterday, K-Electric customers have been unable to access the online services for their account. To resolve this ...
- Critical Bugs in Utilities VPNs Could Cause Physical Damage
July 29, 2020
Remote code-execution vulnerabilities in virtual private network (VPN) products could impact the physical functioning of critical infrastructure in the oil and gas, water and electric utilities space, according to researchers. Researchers at Claroty found that VPNs used to provide remote access to operational technology (OT) networks in industrial systems are vulnerable to an array of security ...
- Two more cyber-attacks hit Israel’s water system
July 20, 2020
Two more cyber-attacks have hit Israel’s water management facilities, officials from the Water Authority said last week. Officials said the attacks took place last month, in June, and didn’t cause any damage to the attacked organizations. The first attack hit agricultural water pumps in upper Galilee, while the second one hit water pumps in the central province ...
- Espionage Group Hits U.S. Utilities with Sophisticated Spy Tool
June 9, 2020
The APT known as TA410 has added a modular remote-access trojan (RAT) to its espionage arsenal, deployed against Windows targets in the United States’ utilities sector. According to researchers at Proofpoint, the RAT, called FlowCloud, can access installed applications and control the keyboard, mouse, screen, files, services and processes of an infected computer, with the ability ...
- UK electricity middleman hit by cyber-attack
May 14, 2020
Elexon, a crucial middleman in the UK power grid network, reported that it fell victim to a cyber-attack earlier today. In a short message posted on its website, the company said the incident only impacted its internal IT network and employee laptops. The company’s email server was also impacted and had been taken down, cutting employees off from crucial ...
- Israel government tells water treatment companies to change passwords
April 27, 2020
The Israeli government says that hackers have targeted its water supply and treatment facilities last week. In a security alert sent by the Israeli National Cyber-Directorate (INCD), the agency is urging personnel at companies active in the energy and water sectors to change passwords for all internet-connected systems. If passwords can’t be changed, the agency recommended taking ...
- Ransomware Hits U.S. Electric Utility
February 27, 2020
The Reading Municipal Light Department (RMLD) was infected with ransomware, as revealed in a statement by the electric utility. RMLD did not disclose the details on how their system was infected or the demands of the group behind the malware. There was also no indication of plans to pay ransom to the threat actors. RMLD is an electric utility in ...
- Thousands of PCs Affected by Nodersok/Divergent Malware
September 27, 2019
New malware identified by Microsoft and Cisco Talos has affected thousands of PCs in the United States and Europe and turns systems into proxies for performing malicious activity, the companies said. The fileless threat—called Nodersok by Microsoft and Divergent by Cisco Talos—has many of its own components but also takes advantage of existing tools to do ...
- 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 ...
- 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 ...
- Nation-State APTs Target U.S. Utilities With Dangerous Malware
August 2, 2019
Researchers believe that nation-state actors are behind several spearphishing campaigns targeting U.S. utility companies with a newly-identified malware, which has the capabilities to view system data and reboot machines. Lure emails were sent to three U.S. utilities companies between July 19 and 25. They purported to be from a U.S.-based engineering licensing board, but actually contained ...
- 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 ...
- In County Crippled by Hurricane, Water Utility Targeted in Ransomware Attack
October 15, 2018
The Emotet Trojan is behind a crippling ransomware attack that hit the Onslow Water and Sewer Authority. A “critical water utility” has been targeted in a recent ransomware attack, significantly impeding its ability to provide service in the week after Hurricane Florence hit the East Coast of the U.S. The Onslow Water and Sewer Authority (ONWASA) said ...
- Major Irish utility networks vulnerable to cyber attacks set to have security increased
September 19, 2018
Our water supplies, electricity and gas grids and phone networks are all vulnerable to cyber-attacks from tech-terrorists and are about to have their security beefed-up. That is because all of our utilities and essential State services are in some way or another reliant on digital technology, which in turn makes them vulnerable to digital attack. Minister Denis ...
- Poor cybersecurity could destabilise increasingly complex energy grids
July 26, 2018
The future of smart energy grids, with automatic management of both supply and demand, is “looking really interesting”, says Phil Kernick, chief technology officer at security firm CQR Consulting. But the current state of the technology and its security is a problem. “The distribution systems and the generation systems were deployed a decade and a half ...
- No big deal… Kremlin hackers ‘jumped air-gapped networks’ to pwn US power utilities
July 24, 2018
The US Department of Homeland Security is once again accusing Russian government hackers of penetrating America’s critical infrastructure. Uncle Sam’s finest reckon Moscow’s agents managed to infiltrate computers networks within US electric utilities – to the point where the miscreants could have virtually pressed the off switch in control rooms, yanked the plug on the Yanks, ...
- Smart meters could leave British homes vulnerable to cyber attacks, experts have warned
February 18, 2018
New smart energy meters that the Government wants to be installed in millions of homes will leave householders vulnerable to cyber attacks, ministers have been warned. The intelligence agency GCHQ is said to have raised concerns over the security of the meters, which could enable hackers to steal personal details and defraud consumers by tampering with ...
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