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posted by janrinok on Friday December 15 2017, @04:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the ooops,-there-goes-another-one dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/12/game-changing-attack-on-critical-infrastructure-site-causes-outage/

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Kromagv0 on Friday December 15 2017, @06:50PM

    by Kromagv0 (1825) on Friday December 15 2017, @06:50PM (#610398) Homepage

    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.

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