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from the ooops,-there-goes-another-one dept.
Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
Hackers who may have been working on behalf of a nation recently caused an operational outage at a critical-infrastructure site, researchers said Thursday. The attackers did so by using a novel piece of malware to target the system that prevents health- and life-threatening accidents.
The malware was most likely designed to cause physical damage inside the unnamed site, researchers from the Mandiant division of security firm FireEye said in a report. It worked by targeting a safety instrumented system, which the targeted facility and many other critical infrastructure sites use to prevent unsafe conditions from arising. The malware has been alternately named Triton and Trisis, because it targeted the Triconex product line made by Schneider Electric.
"Mandiant recently responded to an incident at a critical infrastructure organization where an attacker deployed malware designed to manipulate industrial safety systems," Mandiant researchers wrote. "The targeted systems provided emergency shutdown capability for industrial processes. We assess with moderate confidence that the attacker was developing the capability to cause physical damage and inadvertently shutdown operations."
The accidental outage was likely the result of the Triconex SIS, or "safety instrumented system." The SIS shut down operations when it experienced an error that occurred as the hackers were performing reconnaissance on the facility. Although the hackers were likely seeking the ability to cause physical damage inside the facility, the November shutdown was likely not deliberate.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jmorris on Friday December 15 2017, @05:57PM (8 children)
The website for Triconex is content free but it is a safe bet we are talking about another Windows exploit, right? This is news why? If you run Windows on anything important you will lose, you deserve to lose and you should be fired for being a loser. If you use Windows on a system that can kill people you should be fired from a cannon into the Sun.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Kromagv0 on Friday December 15 2017, @06:50PM
Looks like it indeed was a windows issue given that the main executable is trilog.exe [fireeye.com]. To me this sounds a lot like companies not following current best practices. For ICS systems a close match would be things like NERC CIP [nerc.com], the Cybersecurity Procurement Language for Energy Delivery Systems [energy.gov] document, and not using something like the CIS benchmarks [cisecurity.org] for your systems. I have a feeling that they likely weren't' even following the awful but better than nothing PCI DSS [pcisecuritystandards.org] standard. While the language in each document tends to be tailored to a specific industry it shouldn't be that difficult to make the concepts and actions applicable to yours, especially when going from SCADA systems to ICS systems.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 15 2017, @06:53PM
Just DuckDuckGo "Triconex windows" and you'll see that your assumptions are correct: it runs on Microsoft's finest.
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Friday December 15 2017, @08:29PM (1 child)
The Sun should not be used as a dumping ground for that level of filth.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday December 15 2017, @11:33PM
May we use Oracle instead?
A little extra filth won't make much of a difference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday December 15 2017, @08:59PM (3 children)
You're absolutely right about Windows, but I don't quite agree with the last part.
It's true: using Windows for critical infrastructure is incompetent and stupid. Worse, was this "critical infrastructure" system connected to the internet? That too is incompetent and stupid.
But firing people into the Sun is uncalled for. It's extremely expensive to launch people into space, and the idiots who did this would probably die very quickly that way. I think a more fitting punishment is slowly lowering them into an acid bath. This will also be much less expensive.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday December 15 2017, @09:07PM
I'm reasonable, whatever gets the point made. I'm like the left head of the three headed giant, "All right, all right, all right. We'll kill him first and then have tea and biscuits."
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday December 15 2017, @11:31PM
Just "invite" them to visit an abandoned mine for a few weeks with only one box of matches.
They should feel very secure inside all that obscurity.
(Score: 2) by Tara Li on Wednesday December 20 2017, @09:22PM
Launch them into space is fine - just aim for the Moon. Moon bases will need more organics for fertilizer.