Are Russian hackers going to turn off the lights?
The victims of an ongoing, long-running Russian-backed hacking campaign against infrastructure providers, including electric companies, number in the "hundreds," but immediate electrical blackouts resulting from the hacks to the grid are not in the cards, at least not in the short term, according to DHS officials.
The Wall Street Journal reported July 23 that Jonathan Homer, chief of industrial control system analysis at the Department of Homeland Security said in an industry briefing that Russian hackers had claimed "hundreds of victims" in a sustained campaign last summer aimed at infiltrating industrial control systems of U.S. critical infrastructure providers.
The incursions, Homer claimed, could have resulted in ICS equipment being manipulated into disrupting electrical power flows. The hackers mined confidential information from ICS support vendors to possibly leverage it to gain access to infrastructure equipment, he said.
