Industry News

Lessons From The Ukraine Electric Grid Hack

March 15, 2016
David Morris

This is a good read to get a technical understanding of the Ukraine cyber attack. Investigators have figured out all the details…

Some key items:

• The attackers installed custom firmware on the Serial to Ethernet devices to “brick” them, rendering them inoperable so the operators could not communicate to the sub-stations.
• The UPS were shut off by the attackers.  The attackers used a command line interface on an embedded web browser.  The header of the pertinent section of the article aptly states “Uninterruptible power supplies need protection, too”
• “KillDisk” virus was used to wipe master boot records of the systems they hacked as well as to delete some logs.

What’s interesting about this attack (and must have many experts worried) is that they went after a lot of pieces of the ICS, not just the controller.  It shows that Bedrock’s strategy of securing all pieces of our system is right.  We’ve been asked: Why does the UPS and power supply need all this high tech security?  The answer: It keeps your lights on!