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Ethical Hacking

Wade Mackey

Ethical Hacking

MIS 5211.001 ■ Fall 2019 ■ Wade Mackey
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Russia’s Grid Hackers Aimed for Physical Destruction

September 13, 2019 by Andrew P. Sardaro Leave a Comment

I remember reading about this power grid attack against Ukraine in 2016, and experts were puzzled as to why the attack just accomplished a temporary outage. Some speculated that is was just probing the power grid for a more complex attack at a later date. This article has a different theory. The malware Russia used to overload the electric transmission station, just north of the city of Kiev, was “Crash Override” (https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA17-163A). The malware interacts/attacks electric industrial equipment by sending multiple commands using  four different protocols to open circuit breakers causing mass power outages.

Researches recently discovered that the malware also attacked a vulnerability in a piece of Siemens equipment (protective relay) used as an electric grid fail safe. The disabling of the protective relays would be unknown to the first responders trying to restore power to the grids. Researchers now believe that the intention was for grid engineers to quickly respond to this outage and restore power to the failed equipment manually. The danger here is while restoring power to the grid, and without the protective relay fail-safes in place, a critical overload of electrical current to  transformers and power lines could have caused catastrophic damage to the electrical grid equipment, caused physical harm to workers, and  would have caused significant downtime of the electrical grid.

https://www.wired.com/story/russia-ukraine-cyberattack-power-grid-blackout-destruction/

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  • Uncategorized (55)
  • Week 01: Overview (6)
  • Week 02: TCP/IP and Network Architecture (2)
  • Week 03: Reconnaisance (7)
  • Week 04: Network Mapping and Vulnerability Scanning (4)
  • Week 05: Metasploit (9)
  • Week 06: More Metasploit (8)
  • Week 07: Social Engineering (11)
  • Week 08: Malware (19)
  • Week 09: Web Application Hacking (14)
  • Week 10: SecuritySheperd (12)
  • Week 11: Intro to Dark Web and Intro to Cloud (10)
  • Week 12: Introduction to Wireless Security with WEP and WPA2 PSK (6)
  • Week 13: WPA2 Enterprise and Beyond WiFi (11)
  • Week 14: Jack the Ripper, Cain and Able, and Ettercap (9)

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