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DDOS Attack Halts Heating in Finland Amidst Winter

posted by martyb on Friday November 11 2016, @08:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the VERY-not-nice dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

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.]

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 12 2016, @12:04AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 12 2016, @12:04AM (#425866)

    but that computer most certainly does NOT need internet access.

    IoT devices need to have their own Facebook pages so they can get their fix of cat videos and a Twitter feed so they can post temperature change status updates. How do you expect them to do all that without an internet connection?