ESET Threat Blog

SCADA, a network-enabled setup for controlling infrastructure, is hitting the headlines in force for falling victim to cyber scammers. There have been several incidents of unauthorized access to Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems recently, from guessing simple passwords, to full-on spear phishing attacks against a hardware vendor, which were then used to access … Read More…

Awhile back we noticed signals from the US Pentagon that they were considering the possibility of a traditional military response to cyber attacks on US physical infrastructure. Basically, a cyber attack on infrastructure could be considered an act of war. We now see the official report released, confirming this.
The report states, “When warranted, we will … Read More…

We see this morning a post about British Prime Minister Cameron’s assertion yesterday during a Parliament presentation that, “Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. And when people are using social media for violence, we need to stop them.” Sort of hearkens back to the … Read More…

On the heels of the recent activity with Stuxnet, the industrial process control computer worm that targeted Iranian nuclear centrifuges, a Blackhat talk by Thanassis Giannetsos explains how to hack yet another commonly used family of controllers. We have mused that this trend, targeting critical infrastructure nodes, is but a shade of things yet to … Read More…

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s (NERC) newly formed Cyber Attack Task Force will “consider the impacts of a coordinated cyber attack on the reliability of the bulk power system”, in a proactive effort to increase providers’ readiness for new waves of potential nastiness. Recently, there has been a flurry of activity surrounding efforts to … Read More…

Or so the latest report from DEBKAfile states, claiming the Stuxnet worm broke numerous Iranian centrifuges by forcing them to overspeed, causing damage and prompting the replacement of some 5,000-6,000 units. They cite “intelligence sources” as the source of information. Whether or not this will be confirmed, it seems malware authors clearly are targeting political … Read More…

Al-Qaida appears to have had its web communications hit by hackers, thwarting its continued effort at updating the world about its activities. It appears that a good portion of their global web presence has been affected. A year ago a similar style attack halted their web communications.
According to Evan Kohlmann from Flashpoint Global Partners, which … Read More…

The Obama administration seems intent on pushing for stiffer sentences for hackers caught endangering national security to 20 years prison time, doubling the current sentence. A stiff penalty, to be sure, the latest in a series of volleys from D.C. to curb the flurry of recent high-profile attacks and restore confidence in the U.S. Government’s … Read More…

In fact, the main point of the article I just sent up to SC Magazine's Cybercrime Corner, "Stuxnet: Paradigms Lost and Paradise Regained" is that the 'next Stuxnet' probably won't be any such thing, whatever we may choose to call it.
Stuxnet was certainly a warning, but the message is a bit less dramatic than a … Read More…

[Update: that article "IMF and the weakest link" is now up on SC Magazine's Cybercrime Corner.]
In a recent article for SC Magazine (I'll post the link here when it gets posted) on the International Monetary Fund security breach, I focused on the implications of technological versus psychosocial threats and countermeasures. Not, of course, the first time I've … Read More…