Digital freeze

[Skybird]

Still consider it to be a good idea to have as many aspects of your life and living being controlled by comuter networks and data networks beyond your control? Smartphone controlled homes? The comforts of digital households and fully interlinked supply grids?

Then do not read on. Som Fins in recent months had a cold wakeup call.

http://metropolitan.fi/entry/ddos-attack-halts-heating-in-finland-amidst-winter


Go on, ban cash money and force people to hold all their savings in digital nill-and-void format only... You sooner or later get what you "paid" for.

[Catfish]

^ "Blackout" by Marc Elsberg describes the cyber attack (of terrorists, in this case) on the energy systems and even power plants. The latter work with decade-old mostly unprotected software, and they even use all the same in all systems, at least in Germany.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackout_%E2%80%93_Morgen_ist_es_zu_sp%C3%A4t

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligenter_Z%C3%A4hler

[Dowly]

Riiiiight.

(quotes taken from here (http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showpost.php?p=2445181&postcount=7))

In Finland, in a region where they have temps of -30°C, for months the central heating of several towns and villages was targetted by massive hacker attacks that prevented the central core installations from starting to work. For months.Months? It's not even a month since the incident happened!

Towns and villages? Can you name any of them? Only two apartment buildings in Lappeenranta were affected.

The attack was aimed towards a target in Europe, Valtia's systems weren't the target, they just were hijacked to be used in the main attack, because the only security it had was username/password.

They sell security solutions, but before this no one has really bothered to get one.

Quite a problem with -30° around you. They had to fall back to the dratsic solution of almost cutting all internet and computer wires into the network controlling these heatings.It's not a problem at all, it is an inconvience for the maintenance workers.

Cutting wires?! Where are you getting this from?


One of the biggest advantages of a remote system was shown in this incident: When something strange happened, the maintenance worker on-call got the alarm immediately, and within an hour the remote access had been turned off and the system was again working manually.

[Skybird]

I refer to a German major news article where I first read about this, they had the details that I just re-listed. The link to the English site I then searched myself, or it was linked in that article.

In the German news they adi that it has been severla attacks on different places, that the attacks lasted for longer time, and probably were only test runs to demonstrate the usability of internet-of-things infrastriucture for major botnet attacks and DDoS attacks. There have been other incidents of this pattern - probable test runs for abusing internet of things home infrastructure for the real attack operation - across several places in the West in recent months.

This internet-of-things is a security nightmare, it seems. Makes the vulnerability of the already existing internet infrastructure even much worse. Interesting for intel services, military, and ordinary criminals.

[Dowly]

The foreign media appears to use the Metropolitan.fi article as basis for their reporting. It paints quite the different image to what Valtia's CEO wrote in the official announcement of the attack.

This attack has been made to sound more serious than it was. These systems usually can be switched to manual, for example at our local hospital it is just a matter of flicking a switch and the computer ceases to have any control over that particular system.

Worth noting is also that heating didn't go out, it simply remained at the temperature it was at when the remote system stopped responding.

[Skybird]

That a company's CEO tries to paint things bright, is no surprise. And the dangerous news in all this is that again an attack pattern was demonstrated that uses the spreading "internet-of-things" as weapon platform. Like on severla occasions before in past weeks and months.

The German article said the heatign was off for several days, btw. Rest heat remaining in the system could have been what prevented the system from going to sub freeze degrees.