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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The APT known as TA410 has added a modular remote-access trojan (RAT) to its espionage arsenal, deployed against Windows targets in the United States’ utilities sector.
According to researchers at Proofpoint, the RAT, called FlowCloud, can access installed applications and control the keyboard, mouse, screen, files, services and processes of an infected computer, with the ability to exfiltrate information to a command-and-control (C2) provider. It appears to be related to previous attacks delivering the LookBack malware.
The RAT first scurried onto the scene last summer as part of a spear-phishing campaign. Utility providers received training- and certification-related emails with subject lines such as “PowerSafe energy educational courses (30-days trial),” containing portable executable (PE) attachments, according to a Monday Proofpoint analysis.
To make the effort more convincing, the threat actor-controlled domains that delivered the emails impersonated energy-sector training services, and used subdomains which contained the word “engineer.”
[APT - Advanced Persistent Threat]
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2020, @06:08PM
Jihadis aren't good enough with computers to do this, they prefer suicide vests.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Wednesday June 10 2020, @06:13PM (2 children)
Is this [pinimg.com] why our utilities are still hooked up to the internet?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Kitsune008 on Thursday June 11 2020, @12:02AM (1 child)
Nailed it in one.
Bottom line, if it's connected to the internet, it can be hacked(and probably has/will be hacked). Period.
I keep hearing about such and such infrastructure being infiltrated/hacked, or the possibility of this. I keep asking myself WHY? I could understand it in the 1980's, but almost 40 years later?!?! WTF?!?
Pointy haired bosses and stupid (lack of)security practices will bite us in the ass, hard, in the near future I'm afraid...all in the race for profits in the near term.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @04:26PM
LEA bait.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by stormreaver on Wednesday June 10 2020, @06:20PM (3 children)
Until utility managers start getting prosecuted for putting Windows on important networks, this isn't going to stop.
(Score: 4, Informative) by looorg on Wednesday June 10 2020, @06:39PM (2 children)
Not only in network utilities, I always giggle a bit to myself as I see some system that has crashed -- be it information screens or an ATM -- and you can see that it's running some version of windows.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday June 10 2020, @09:42PM (1 child)
The Register does a series on those sorts of crashes called borkborkbork! which is quite fun.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Thursday June 11 2020, @09:21AM
I think you mistake El Reg for the Swedish chef: a single bork, not 3 [theregister.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @01:38PM (1 child)
" delivered the emails impersonated energy-sector training services"
Wow
I can see that remote access over the Internet over carefully controlled equipment might be a necessary evil.
Anything as complicated as Windows or 'nix probably does not qualify for this level of care.
From recent news, even just a secure VPN server appears hard to do.
Not doing this on something important is painting a target on your back.
BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!
Running E-mail on the same machine is just nuts.
I would ask what they were thinking except they weren't.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday June 11 2020, @04:15PM
Don't blame the engineers.
Good decisions usually work their way from the bottom up through an organization.
While bad decisions work their way from the management down through an organization.
Take off your engineer hat and put on your management hat. Look, we could save the cost of an entire machine. A single Windows 95 desktop could run the physical machine hardware, but also could be connected to the internet and run an email server.
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.