If you're looking for what the damage was, it failed.
Potential damage: "Most notable was one [attack] in Ukraine in December 2015. It left roughly 230,000 people without electricity for about six hours during one of the coldest months of the year."
My first pass through the title was "Those windshield wipers shouldn't need to be internet-connected."
Thankfully, the article did clear that up, but the fact that my brain didn't even think, "that's a stupid idea that no one would buy that" is a bit depressing.
The Jaguar hack cost the UK $2.5Bn and dropped production to levels you'd normally only see during open warfare. Recovery took many months, and the financial damage persists today.
We still operate with a primitive homunculi where a gunshot is considered aggressive, but sabotaging infrastructure that can kill hundreds from cold is being waved at.
Poland is a major logistical hub for everything going towards Ukraine. Thus targeting basic infrastructure like energy grid or railroad have to be expected.
On the bright side, using these weapon grade malware is burning exploits and also showing current state and techniques of Russian cyberwarfare which defender can learn a lot from.
While there's some overlap in methodologies and back-and-forth with various escalations, so-called malware is distinct from software exploits. Malware can be delivered without an exploit and quite often is. Social engineering is highly effective.
> On the bright side, using these weapon grade malware is burning exploits and also showing current state and techniques of Russian cyberwarfare which defender can learn a lot from.
Or perhaps they used an already-known malware to measure defensive capabilities without showing any of their cards.
No, of course not. They want to also measure response in the physical aspects (like electricians thot would have to drive some time to arrive on site). They're testing end-to-end, so to say. There's no testing like testing in production.
before anyone jumps on the pedantry bandwagon, its worth noting that even though open war hasn’t been called: the attacks on infrastructure especially cyber warfare is extremely active and, crucially, direct.
It is totally fair to say that in a digital context, Russia is absolutely at war with Europe.
As far as I can tell, they don’t even try to hide it.
True, but they’ve certainly been doing it much longer than ten years. I’ll never forget this headline [0] that struck me as purely devilish, especially in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election. Combine that with the knowledge that Trump has been anti-NATO since the 1980s [1]. Who knows how long Russia has been nudging him along. Who knows how many avenues they traverse? Take for example the letter to Senator Tom Cotton about Greenland [2]. What an embarrassment. I can only hope we are equally successful in our own PsyOps.
Some could say that in the cyber realm, they are not petty, ya! Well, or something like that.
Eversince notpetya and the colonial pipeline hack, the cyber strategy game changed a lot. Notpetya was genius as a deployment, because they abused the country's tax software deployment pipeline to cripple all (and I mean all, beyond 99%) businesses in one surgical strike.
The same is gonna happen to other tax software providers, because the DATEV AG and similar companies are pretty much the definition of digital incompetence wherever you look.
I could name other takedowns but the list would continue beyond a reasonable comment, especially with vendors like Hercules and Prophete that are now insolvent because they never prioritized cyber security at all, got hacked, didn't have backups, and ran out of money due to production plant costs.
This completely ignores that: 1. Russia was the aggressor in Ukraine, 2. Putin has made clear his desire to pursue expansionist goals through military action targeting prior members of the Soviet Union, 3. Putin regular threatens nuclear war with Ukraine, 4. Russia has shown outward hostility towards Western democracies and sought to manipulate elections with information warfare to reach their goals (most notably, 2016 US Election and Brexit), 5. Russian regularly cuts cables connecting countries, and 6. Though completely unrelated, Putin has a history of assassinating political opponents. That's wolfish behavior if I've ever seen it.
Funny that I got three replies all stating the same thing, that Russia is the aggressor and has invaded Ukraine. Of course it is so, and then? Russia invaded Ukraine, not the EU. It's the EU that has decided to get involved in the war by supporting Ukraine.
Can you give some examples of? I can imagine that under the right circumstances you might succeed in blowing up some transformers or even a turbine, but it seems like you’d be up to speed within a month or two on the outside? Or am I missing the gravity somehow?
Pardon? A month or two without power does not seem like an enormous crisis?
Stuxnet destroyed centrifuges. It does not seem impossible that a sophisticated attack could shred some critical equipment.
During the Texas 2021 outage -they were incredibly close to losing the entire grid and being in a blackstart scenario. Estimates were that it could take weeks to bring back power - all this without any physical equipment destroyed or malicious code within the network.
Edit: Had to look it up, the Texas outage was "only" two weeks and scattershot in where it hit. The death toll is estimated at 246-702.
Yes, there is the risk of cascading failures, some industrial processes are very hard to re-start once interrupted (or even impossible) and the lead time on 'some transformers' can be a year or more. These are nothing like the kind that you can buy at the corner hardware store. A couple of hundred tons or so for the really large ones.
Grid infra is quite expensive, hard to replace and has very long lead times.
The very worst you could do is induce oscillations.
> Transformers and turbines of any significance are not off the shelf parts and can have lead times of years
Bloomberg had a decent article[0] about transformers and their lead time. They're currently a bottleneck on building. It wasn't paywalled for me.
"The Covid-19 pandemic strained many supply chains, and most have recovered by now. The supply chain for transformers started experiencing troubles earlier — and it’s only worsened since. Instead of taking a few months to a year, the lead time for large transformer delivery is now three to five years. " [0]
Enough for the entire grid? There are some amount of reserves on hand (eg drunk runs into a telephone pole), but nothing that could replace a targeted attack with the explicit goal of taking out the most vital infrastructure.
And those pole mounted transformers are tiny. The big ones require special transports and can weigh a few hundred tons. Some are so large they are best transported via boat if possible.
These attacks are not at the level of 'flipping a switch'. If they succeed they can destabilize the grid and that has the potential to destroy gear, and while not as costly as blowing up a dam it can still be quite costly.
I was not speaking to just one case. Today's incident, is _the norm_.
These attacks are widespread, damaging, and the repercussions are felt for decades in their wake. We _are_ being carpet bombed, and the costs for the victims are ongoing and growing. The collateral damage is everywhere.
Do you really think there's no impact?
> Cyber units from at least one nation state routinely try to explore and exploit Australia’s critical infrastructure networks, almost certainly mapping systems so they can lay down malware or maintain access in the future.
> We recently discovered one of those units targeting critical networks in the United States. ASIO worked closely with our American counterpart to evict the hackers and shut down their global accesses, including nodes here in Australia.
I guess I shouldn't be drawn by someone calling me an idiot...
But one last try.
You suggested that the cost of cyberattacks on industry, is not so great as when we were destroying it with bombs instead.
However, every time we have power outages, people die. Then we have the cost of securing the infrastructure. And the cost of everyone else affected, who has to increase their resilience.
Your bank is collateral damage, as is the people freezing to death in their homes. Entire industries are on the verge of collapse - getting a new turbine to help stabilise your grid has a lead time of _years_, not days or weeks. And if you hit weeks, people die.
Insurance responds to attacks, and that trickles out to everywhere that is touched. VISA and MasterCard have to prepare for eventualities, because of attacks not aimed at them, but at power infrastructure.
When power is hit... There is nothing unaffected.
Volt Typhoon hit the US power grid, and required a massive multinational effort to extract them, that took almost a year... And VT wasn't intended to do damage, just look for weak spots. So that next time, they can cause damage. As part of that survival process, various hardware partners were kicked to the curb, and the repercussions are still in the process of being felt. Half the industry may have issues surviving because of it.
Industroyer is one of the reasons that Kyiv got as bad as it did. Malware is not some hand-wave and fix thing. Half the city's relays were permanently damaged.
Then of course, there was Stuxnet. Which blew up centrifuges, and the research centres hit are still trying to recover from where they were, then.
Cyberattacks are a weapon of war, people die, industries die, and there is no easy path to recovery following it.
An entire industry exists, just to defend against these kinds of attacks. The money spent on that, is counted, which means it has to be less than the cost of the attack succeeding. Trillions are spent, because there is absolute weight behind surviving these attacks.
If things were easier, it'd be an industry solely focused on backups and flipping a switch. But it's not.
Does Europe overall feel and act like that’s the case though?
It seems as if the European war has been pushed to the background recently, and most people kind of forgot about it. If you walk down the streets of Paris or Berlin does it look like it’s wartime, do people talk about it much, do they share the latest front news and so on?
>If you walk down the streets of Paris or Berlin does it look like it’s wartime,
Like what exactly would you want them to do? Run around screaming all day because there's a war in another country 2000 km away from them?
No, people just go on with their lives, doing their jobs, taking care of family and friends, paying their taxes, so that specialized workers in the ministry of defence can take care of the war stuff for them. That's how modern society works.
It's even similar in Kiev, when you walk down the streets you see people living their lives. Gyms, bars, cafes, clubs are full and lively. People don't stop living and enjoying their daily lives just because there's shelling somewhere else in the country.
> It's even similar in Kiev, when you walk down the streets you see people living their lives. Gyms, bars, cafes, clubs are full and lively. People don't stop living and enjoying their daily lives just because there's shelling somewhere else in the country.
While it's true to a certain degree, you make it sound like Kyiv residents are having a grand old time right now. But in reality, the majority are trying very hard to keep from freezing to death as Russian attacks targeting their power and heating infrastructure have destroyed much of it.
I beg to differ. Calling going out to a gym, cafe, club or a bar during wartime, as anything other than enjoying life, diminishes the real tragedy of those who are fighting on the front line and don't enjoy such leisure activities. Some people are fortunate enough that they can still get to enjoy life even if their country is in a war, as just like in every war ever, not everyone is affected equally.
Countless NGOs, in the past decades, pushed for mass migration to France, and called any opposing voice "nazis", the "darkest hours of our history", etc.
We know the name of their leaders, their (ethno-religious) background, etc. They aren't Iranian. They aren't Muslim. They aren't Russian...
have you seen the competence in those who manage the infrastructure? i'd say i would need significant proof before assuming anything. And IF russia is doing it, I would still say that we should put 99% blame on the absolute incompetents running the infrastructure, 1% russia.
A tank is designed for war. Infrastructure is designed to serve some other utility. Claiming it should also be hardened against (cyber) war is acknowledging that there is an aggressor performing an attack of war, not that the infrastructure is failing the utility it was designed for.
It's fine to have this view that software should be defect free and hardened against sophisticated nation-state attackers, but it stretches the meaning of "defect" to me. A defect would be serving to fulfill that utility it had been designed for, not succumbing to malicious attackers.
The most obvious answer is Russia(or one of their allies like China or Iran) did it because Poland is supporting Ukraine in the war (directly, and also indirectly by letting stuff from other countries be staged and move through Poland).
That would be the most obvious answer, but Russia wants to keep Poland off-balance over the next 2 decades so that they won't intervene as Russia captures its neighbors. You'll see a lot more sabotage in France if Europe agrees to a new nuclear defense pact.
Russia is currently focused at striking Ukrainian energy assets. Ukraine get energy imports from EU through Hungary and Poland. Hampering energy supply from Poland would but a huge strain on the already struggling Ukrainian network.
Potential damage: "Most notable was one [attack] in Ukraine in December 2015. It left roughly 230,000 people without electricity for about six hours during one of the coldest months of the year."
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