{"id":5186,"date":"2016-02-15T18:08:20","date_gmt":"2016-02-15T18:08:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kasperskydaily.com\/b2b\/?p=5186"},"modified":"2019-11-15T22:54:52","modified_gmt":"2019-11-15T11:54:52","slug":"a-bug-in-the-grid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/a-bug-in-the-grid\/5186\/","title":{"rendered":"A bug in the grid: about an incident with Israel Electric Authority"},"content":{"rendered":"

In late January, news slipped out regarding a very disquieting incident\u00a0in Israel: The country\u2019s Electric Authority \u2013 an agency in charge of regulating and overseeing the distribution of electricity in Israel \u2013\u00a0had to mitigate what officials there called a \u201csevere cyber attack.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

The details of the incident are hazy, but apparently this was either a virus or (probably) a ransomware. This implies a non-targeted nature of the attack, although there were sensitive consequences nevertheless: temperatures all across Israel rapidly plunged.<\/p>\n

Israel officials later claimed that it was \u201cjust unbelievable\u201d that the Electric Authority\u2019s computers weren\u2019t secured in a proper manner.<\/p>\n

Why not?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Is it truly unbelievable? Many governmental entities over the last few years have been subject to various forms of cyberattacks, ranging from DDoS (just late January a number of gov\u2019t websites in Ireland went under heavy attack<\/a>) to sophisticated intrusions like the one that targeted<\/a>\u00a0the Australian Bureau of Meteorology last December \u2013 Its system has links to the Department of Defense network, which is the most probable reason for the attack.<\/p>\n

In other words, a cyberattack on a nation\u2019s civilian and critical infrastructure is something long-feared and not impossible. Late last year, an attack hit Western Ukraine power company Prykarpattyaoblenergo, leaving hundreds of thousands of residents in the Ivano-Frankivisk region in the dark. According to Threatpost, attackers peddling BlackEnergy malware have demonstrated an affinity for targeting power facilities, generation operators, and power sites in the past and are believed to have had a hand in the attack.\u00a0Black Energy was just recently covered on Kaspersky Business, along with mitigation methods description<\/a>.<\/p>\n

All of these stories reveal one not-so-simple thing: Critical infrastructure in various countries may become<\/a> and have become\u00a0targets\u00a0for cyberattacks and the attacks don\u2019t always need to be excessively sophisticated to\u00a0have at\u00a0least some degree of success.<\/p>\n

Any possible scenario<\/strong><\/p>\n

The scantness of detail in regard to Israel\u2019s incident disallows judging what happened exactly, but it is known that last summer The Israeli National Cyber Defense Authority warned the State could be targeted by cyberattacks and that security officials should \u201cprepare for any possible scenario.\u201d<\/p>\n

This recommendation can be offered to any country with a developed IT infrastructure in the world today. And being prepared usually means\u00a0having\u00a0the appropriate tools and\u00a0techniques ready to repel intruders \u2013 a multilayered system that\u00a0would combine administrative, OS and network-based measures \u2013 as well as specialized technological measures addressing individual layers of your IT infrastructure. While this article<\/a> covers\u00a0countering the Black Energy attacks,\u00a0its final part contains\u00a0some very versatile recipes\u00a0on how to secure the important data and infrastructure from today\u2019s cyberthreats.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Israel’s Electric Authority – an agency in charge of regulating and overseeing the distribution of electricity in Israel – had to mitigate what officials there called a “severe cyber attack.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":209,"featured_media":15315,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1999,2994],"tags":[756,2071],"class_list":{"0":"post-5186","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"category-smb","9":"tag-critical-infrastructure","10":"tag-cyberattacks"},"hreflang":[{"hreflang":"en-au","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/a-bug-in-the-grid\/5186\/"},{"hreflang":"ru","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.ru\/blog\/a-bug-in-the-grid\/3569\/"},{"hreflang":"x-default","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/a-bug-in-the-grid\/5186\/"},{"hreflang":"en-za","url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.co.za\/blog\/a-bug-in-the-grid\/5186\/"}],"acf":[],"banners":"","maintag":{"url":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/tag\/critical-infrastructure\/","name":"critical infrastructure"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/209"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5186"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24607,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5186\/revisions\/24607"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}