First time in history: Malware caused blackout in Ukraine.
"Thousands of people in Ukraine experienced a power blackout caused by hackers who attacked electrical substations during the holiday season," researchers report, essentially hinting at the possible cyberattacks we will see in the near future.
“This is the first incident we know of where a hacker attack caused a power outage,” says John Hultquist, head of iSIGHT. “It was a scenario we had been worried about for several years.”
The power outage initially knocked out a local control center, leaving half of the homes in Ukraine's Ivano-Frankivsk region without power for several hours, Ukrainian news service TSN reported in an article published a day after the Dec. 23 failure. The report also said the outage was the result of malware that disconnected electrical substations.
iSIGHT researchers on Monday said their analysis of malware found in the systems of three local power plants confirms that a 'catastrophic' cyberattack led to a series of blackouts in the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine.
According to experts who have studied in depth the possibilities of cyberattacks on electrical networks, they report that power outages can lead to a series of serious consequences for the societies that will be affected, both at the level of transportation and at the level of communications.
If confirmed, this would be the first recorded incident in history in which a hacker group or a single hacker using malware managed to cause an extensive power outage.
