A Cyberattack Has Caused Confirmed Physical Damage for the Second Time Ever
January 16th, 2015Via: Wired:
Amid all the noise the Sony hack generated over the holidays, a far more troubling cyber attack was largely lost in the chaos. Unless you follow security news closely, you likely missed it.
I’m referring to the revelation, in a German report released just before Christmas (.pdf), that hackers had struck an unnamed steel mill in Germany. They did so by manipulating and disrupting control systems to such a degree that a blast furnace could not be properly shut down, resulting in “massive”—though unspecified—damage.
This is only the second confirmed case in which a wholly digital attack caused physical destruction of equipment. The first case, of course, was Stuxnet, the sophisticated digital weapon the U.S. and Israel launched against control systems in Iran in late 2007 or early 2008 to sabotage centrifuges at a uranium enrichment plant.
Related: The Birth of D Weapons
About 5 or 6 years ago, a large portion of the Boeing Fabrication Division in Auburn, Washington, had to bring in many semi trailer size emergency generators for months to keep the place running after an unplanned anomally of unspecified and hushed nature screwed up much of the plant’s high voltage wiring system to the extent where wiring had to be replaced. Damaged WIRING carrying huge power loads and many miles of it- cleaning out the supply in half of the nation. It was all hushed up. Power substations onsite use Seimens controllers. The whe thing seemed like Stuxnet to me.