"DHS: America's water and power utilities under daily cyber-attack"
"On a daily basis, the U.S. is being targeted," said Sanaz Browarny, chief, intelligence and analysis, control systems security program at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as she presented some statistics from fly-away trips taken last year by the ICS emergency response team to utilities, most in the private sector...
There are three basic types of attacks coming at these utilities today, she said, those being thrill-seeking "garden-variety" hackers that target known vulnerabilities; secondly, the dangerous volley of viruses, worms and botnet attacks; and thirdly, "nation-state actors" that have "unlimited funding available" and conduct espionage as they "establish a covert presence on a sensitive network."...
Kevin Helmsley, a leader in the emergency-response effort in the Control Systems Security Program at ICS-CERT, which operates under DHS, said the count of "incident tickets" related to reported incidents at water and power-generating utilities is going up. While only nine incidents were reported in 2009, last year this grew to 198 incident tickets. Just over 40% came from water-sector utilities, with the rest from various energy, nuclear energy and chemical providers...
"We are a nation at war. And that war is raging 24 x 7 in cyberspace," Curtis Levinson, technical director to NATO, who moderated the panel, put it bluntly. "It's not only hitting stock exchanges and websites. They're also hitting power systems." (emphasis added)
A successful cyber-attack on an atomic reactor could cause a catastrophic release of hazardous radioactivity.
April 4, 2012