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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: 2) by quietus on Friday November 11 2016, @10:24PM
It's a company with only 10 employees, according to their LinkedIn page. The description given is a bit lacking in technical detail -- the reboot loop might as well be something like 3 retries, after operations has turned over onto a standby device; there's no mentioning (at least not in the English language summary [valtia.fi]) of HVAC being turned off, only that the settings were stuck in the last controlled position.
The company claims to have restored functionality only 1 hour after the alarm went off. Apart from the question which kind of alarm they're talking about, typically DDoS attacks occur in waves and their reporting should reflect that. DDoS attacks are also often used to hide other types of attack, like e.g. directly on the firewall software itself -- but no mentioning about that either. Then there's the odd reference to dedicated firewalls costing 300-500 euros -- these kind of devices normally have their own built-in firewall, though that, or any other, firewall won't help at all when under DDoS.