'Time is Running Out'
By Kevin Poulsen
Seven minutes before midnight last Dec. 17, a bomb of sorts went off in a high voltage substation north of Kiev.
But
if you were standing outside the 20 acres of gleaming metal
transformers and coils, you wouldn’t have heard a bang or seen a flash.
It wasn’t that kind of bomb. It was a piece of malicious software that
had been hiding in a control room computer miles away, waiting for the
right time to reveal itself. At 11:53 p.m., the logic bomb transmitted a
staccato burst of pre-programmed commands to the substation, popping
one circuit breaker after another until a strip of houses in and around
western Kiev were plunged into darkness.
Technicians responded to the Pivnichna substation and took the circuit
breakers off computer control, restoring power a little after 1 a.m. It
was only the second confirmed case
of a computer attack triggering an electrical blackout, and compared to
the first, 12 months earlier—also in Ukraine—it was a fizzle, affecting
far fewer customers and for a fraction of the time. In the six months
since the Kiev
attack, security researchers have wondered why the hackers even
bothered with such a fleeting disruption and speculated that someone was
using Ukraine as a testing ground for a more serious attack.
Click here for the full article.
Source: The Daily Beast
No comments:
Post a Comment