Attack On Ukraine's Power Grid Targeted Transmission Stations
The hackers behind the 2016 Ukraine power cyber-attack had aimed to create conditions to inflict physical damage to the targeted transmission station. A new study by the researchers from the specialist industrial cyber security firm Dragos has recreated the timeline of the attack in an attempt to shed new light on the real motives behind this attack.
In December 2016, Russian hackers planted a malware called "Crash Override" or "Industroyer" in the network of Ukrenergo which is the Ukraine's national grid operator. The malicious programme was then used at around midnight, just two days before Christmas, to trip each single circuit breaker in a power transmission station located close to Kiev, Ukraine's capital. The result was a quick blackout enveloping the most parts of Kiev.
Although Ukrenergo's engineers were able to restore the power back in about an hour, the incident left many unanswered questions for experts, such as, why Russian hackers used a sophisticated malware to trigger just a one-hour blackout in Ukraine?
The Dragos study entitled "CRASHOVERRIDE: Reassessing the 2016 Ukraine Electric Power Event as a Protection-Focused Attack", attempts to offer potential answers to all such questions.
In this study, researchers re-examined malware's code as well as the network logs of Ukrenergo's systems. They concluded that the hackers had actually aimed to cause physical damage that would have prolonged the blackout to several weeks and possibly also put the lives of on-site operators at risk.
According to the researchers, the hackers first deployed "Crash Override" and used it to trip every single circuit breaker in the grid station, which caused a blackout in Kiev.
Then, about an hour later, they disabled the digital systems of the station to prevent operators from monitoring those systems.
Lastly, hackers exploited a known security bug in station's Siprotec protective relays to disable those equipment, thereby making the station susceptible to dangerously high frequencies of electricity.Protective relays are equipment used to monitor high currents and frequencies at the grid station. Although, Siemens had released a patch in 2015 to fix the vulnerability, many grid stations in Ukraine failed to update their systems in a timely manner. That opened opportunities for hackers to put the device to sleep by just sending an electrical impulse.
Ukraine is not the only country in the world where hackers have constantly tried to target and disrupt the power supply.
In 2013the US said that utility providers were under cyber-attack with one electricity firm reporting 10,000 attempted cyberattacks in a single month.
In June, it was reported that the US had attacked Russian power grids in order to give the US the potentially to conduct cyber-attacks in the event of a major conflict with Russia.
Near the end of the Report Drago say, ‘Moving forward, electric utility operators must be aware of how adversaries executed this attack and its implications for operations’.
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