Hackers Shut Down Heating in Ukrainian City With Malware, Researchers Say (techcrunch.com) 14
An anonymous reader shares a report: For two days in mid-January, some Ukrainians in the city of Lviv had to live without central heating and suffer freezing temperatures because of a cyberattack against a municipal energy company, security researchers and Ukrainian authorities have since concluded. On Tuesday, the cybersecurity company Dragos published a report with details about a new malware dubbed FrostyGoop, which the company says is designed to target industrial control systems -- in this particular case, specifically against a type of heating system controller. Dragos researchers wrote in their report that they first detected the malware in April. At that point, Dragos did not have more information on FrostyGoop apart from the malware sample, and believed it was only used for testing.
Later on, however, Ukrainian authorities warned Dragos that they had found evidence that the malware was actively used in a cyberattack in Lviv during the late evening of January 22 through January 23. "And that resulted in the loss of heating to over 600 apartment buildings for almost 48 hours," said Mark "Magpie" Graham, a researcher at Dragos, during a call with reporters briefed on the report prior to its release. Dragos researchers Graham, Kyle O'Meara, and Carolyn Ahlers wrote in the report that "remediation of the incident took almost two days, during which time the civilian population had to endure sub-zero temperatures." This is the third known outage linked to cyberattacks to hit Ukrainians in recent years.
Later on, however, Ukrainian authorities warned Dragos that they had found evidence that the malware was actively used in a cyberattack in Lviv during the late evening of January 22 through January 23. "And that resulted in the loss of heating to over 600 apartment buildings for almost 48 hours," said Mark "Magpie" Graham, a researcher at Dragos, during a call with reporters briefed on the report prior to its release. Dragos researchers Graham, Kyle O'Meara, and Carolyn Ahlers wrote in the report that "remediation of the incident took almost two days, during which time the civilian population had to endure sub-zero temperatures." This is the third known outage linked to cyberattacks to hit Ukrainians in recent years.
Two days (Score:2)
Two days is a long time without heating, but I'm impressed how quickly this was fixed, kudos to to the good guys involved.
Nuclear Winter Would Be Ugly Over Earth. (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
I dunno about that other shit you are talking about, but yes, it is very easily winnable. Don't tell me you subscribe to the Putin Propaganda channel.
There is no such thing as a nuclear war where anyone wins in the same sense that there is no version of guess-who-pissed-in-the-punch-we-all-just-drank where anyone wins.
Even if Russia nuked themselves with a single warhead and immediately surrendered, we all lose. It's only a question of how badly.
Re: (Score:2)
Are you implying that if a nuke is dropped somewhere we will all die? What the fuck have you been smoking? Cock?
We nuked New Mexico & Nevada many, many times and we lived. Well, except for the cancer we all get now, but I digress.
Digress? No. You're (suddenly, ironically, and accidentally) very on-point.
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seems to be the logic for all the anti nuclear energy power plants too.
Utilities and infrastructure connected to (Score:2)
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Stupid people connect infrastructure and critical systems to the Internet instead of setting up dedicated fiber to link critical systems. The best security is where things are NOT all interconnected.
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yeah but how then will we outsource support to remote call centers elsewhere. also i need to be able to facechat