A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack halted heating distribution at least in two properties in the city of Lappeenranta, located in eastern Finland. In both of the events the attacks disabled the computers that were controlling heating in the buildings.
Both of the buildings where managed by Valtia. The company who is in charge of managing the buildings overall operation and maintenance. According to Valtia CEO, Simo Rounela, in both cases the systems that controlled the central heating and warm water circulation were temporarily disabled.
In the city of Lappeenranta, there were at least two buildings whose systems were knocked down by the network attack. In a DDoS attack the network is overloaded by traffic from multiple locations with the aim of causing the system to fail.
In an interview with Etelä-Saimaa, Rounela estimated the attack in Eastern Finland lasted from late October to Thursday the 3rd of November. The systems that were attacked tried to respond to the attack by rebooting the main control circuit. This was repeated over and over so that heating was never working.
To DDoS heating systems is just, plain cold.
[Typos are in the original story; I suspect English is not their primary language. -Ed.]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 11 2016, @10:04PM
It should also run 100% free software and be able to be customized (i.e. which server you want it to connect to, if any).
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 11 2016, @11:40PM
Free software isn't fucking good enough. If it's not Linux, it's shit!
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 12 2016, @12:04AM
Oh, really? My view is, Linux is just another Unix-like. It happens to be my favorite Unix-like, but let's not get all puffed up over it. Any Unix-like with a decent copy-left attached to it, you've got a good system. BSD's licensing scheme often seems a little inferior to that of Linux, but then, BSD doesn't have precisely the same goals that Linux does. Sys-V seems to be more restrictive than BSD, or maybe that's just me reading the license wrong. Unix itself is a good OS - it's where almost everything else came from. It's just to bad that Sco got hold of it, and dragged it through the barnyard muck.
As for Windows - I can't properly express my contempt for that steaming pile of dung. But, Windows is not free, in any way, shape, or form.
"Free" software. I do believe that GP was referring to libre free, as opposed to free as in beer. If you were referring to spyware, malware, botware, and other malicious code distributed without charge, but without the source, then you do have a point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 12 2016, @12:07AM
If it's not Linux, it's shit!
My BSD kernel disputes your assertion.