February 19, DarkReading – (International) Spike in power grid attacks likely in next 12 months. There is a ‘window of opportunity for malicious intent’ as energy firms roll out smart-grid pilot programs. Attacks against the power grid are likely to rise and intensify during the next 12 months as smart grid research and pilot projects advance, according to utility security experts and a recently published report that analyzes threats to critical infrastructure. The so-called Project Grey Goose Report on Critical Infrastructure points to state and/or non-state sponsored hackers from the Russian Federation of Independent States, Turkey, and China as the main threats to targeting and hacking into energy providers and other critical infrastructure networks. The principal investigator for Project Grey Goose and founder and CEO of GreyLogic says he and other researchers working on the report initially focused on answering the question of whether there have been any successful cyberattacks on the utilities. “Some companies say there’s never been a successful attack against the grid, but that’s not true,” he says. “There have been at least 120 instances” of successful attacks, some of which are documented in the report and date back to 2001. Several utility security experts agree that utility security administrators will have their hands full during the next year, as the transition from isolated, closed energy-generation and transmission networks to IP-based and wireless ones begins to take shape in the form of pilot smart grid projects. The Grey Goose report calls out Russia, Turkish hackers, and China as the top threats to the power grid. “I perceive Russia as the most serious threat [of the three] and China last,” says the report’s principal investigator. That is because hackers
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from China are more likely to hack for espionage purposes than to disrupt the grid, he says. Source: http://www.darkreading.com/security/vulnerabilities/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223000369
