Science fiction-style sabotage a fear in new hacks
When a computer attack hobbled Iran's unfinished nuclear power plant last year, it was assumed to be a military-grade strike, the handiwork of elite hacking professionals with nation-state backing.
Yet for all its science-fiction sophistication, key elements have now been replicated in laboratory settings by security experts with little time, money or specialized skill.
It is an alarming development that shows how technical advances are eroding the barrier that has long prevented computer assaults from leaping from the digital to the physical world.
Exposed: Dillon Beresford said it took him just two months and $20,000 in equipment to find more than a dozen vulnerabilities in electronic controllers of the same type used in Iran
The techniques demonstrated in recentmonths highlight the danger to operators of power plants, water systemsand other critical infrastructure around the world.
Scott Borg is director of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a non-profit group that helps the U.S. government prepare for future attacks
'Things that sounded extremely unlikely a few years ago are now coming along,' he said.
While the experiments have been performed in laboratory settings, and the findings presented at security conferences or in technical papers, the danger of another real-world attack such as the one on Iran is profound.
The team behind the so-called Stuxnet worm that was used to attack the Iranian nuclear facility may still be active. New malicious software with some of Stuxnet's original code and behaviour has surfaced, suggesting ongoing reconnaissance against industrial control systems.
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< ul>And attacks on critical infrastructure are increasing. The Idaho National Laboratory, home to secretive defence labs intended to protect the nation's power grids, water systems and other critical infrastructure, has responded to triplethe number of computer attacks from clients this year over last, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has revealed.
Foryears, ill-intentioned hackers have dreamed of plaguing the world's infrastructure with a brand of sabotage reserved for Hollywood. They've mused about wreaking havoc in industrial settings by burning out power plants, bursting oil and gas pipelines, or stalling manufacturing plants.
But a key roadblock has prevented them from causing widespread destruction: they've lacked a way to take remote control of the electronic 'controller' boxes that serve as the nerve centres for heavy machinery.
Theattack on Iran changed all that. Now, security experts - and presumably, malicious hackers - are racing to find weaknesses. They've found a slew of vulnerabilities.
High risk: The 'Stuxnet' worm - a sophisticated cyber attack on the Bushehr nuclear plant in Iran (pictured here) opened a new era of cyber-warfare
Think of the new! finding s as the hacking equivalent of Moore's Law, the famous rule about computing power that it roughly doubles every couple of years. Just as better computer chips have accelerated the spread of PCs and consumer electronics over the past 40 years, new hacking techniques are making all kinds of critical infrastructure - even prisons - more vulnerable to attacks.
One thing all of the findings have incommon is that mitigating the threat requires organizations to bridge acultural divide that exists in many facilities. Among other things, separate teams responsible for computer and physical security need to start talking to each other and coordinate efforts.
Manyof the threats at these facilities involve electronic equipment known as controllers. These devices take computer commands and send instructions to physical machinery, such as regulating how fast a conveyor belt moves.
Theyfunction as bridges between the computer and physical worlds. Computer hackers can exploit them to take over physical infrastructure. Stuxnet, for example, was designed to damage centrifuges in the nuclear plant being built in Iran by affecting how fast the controllers instructed thecentrifuges to spin. Iran has blamed the U.S. and Israel for trying to sabotage what it says is a peaceful program.
Securityresearcher Dillon Beresford said it took him just two months and $20,000 in equipment to find more than a dozen vulnerabilities in the same type of electronic controllers used in Iran. The vulnerabilities, which included weak password protections, allowed him to take remote control of the devices and reprogram them.
Cyber attack: The nuclear power plant in Bushehr, southern Iran, which was the target of the Stuxnet worm
'What all this is saying is you don't have to be a nation-state to do this stuff. That's very scary,' said Joe Weiss, an industrial con! trol sys tem expert. 'There's a perception barrier, and I think Dillon crashed that barrier.'
One of the biggest makers of industrial controllers is Siemens AG, which made the controllers in question. The company said it has alerted customers, fixed some of the problems and is working closely with CERT, the cybersecurity arm of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Siemens said the issue largely affects older models of controllers. Even with those, the company said, a hacker would have to bypass passwords and other security measures that operators should have in place. Siemens said it knows of no actual break-ins using the techniques identified by Beresford, who works in Austin, Texas, for NSS Labs Inc.
Yet because the devices are designed to last for decades, replacing or updating them isn't always easy. And the more research that comes out, the more likely attacks become.
GROWING MENACE: THE WORST CYBER ATTACKS
Titan Rain: In 2004, secret military intelligence was stolen from NASA, Sandia National Laboratory and U.S. defence contractor Lockheed Martin. China was suspected to be behind the attack.
Stuxnet: Iranian nuclear facilities came under attack from a virus designed to specifically target their computer hardware. Israel and/or the U.S. were strongly suspected of launching the attack.
Moonlight Maze: In 1998 the Pentagon, NASA and the department of energy computer systems were penetrated. The leak lasted for two years before it was eventually plugged - by which countless gigabytes of data had been stolen.
One of the foremost Stuxnet experts, Ralph Langner, a security consultant in Hamburg, Germany, has come up with what he calls a 'time bomb' of just four lines of programming code. He called it the most basic copycat attack that a Stuxnet-inspired prankster, criminal or terrorist could come up with.
'As low-level as these results may be, they will spread throu! gh the h acker community and will attract others who continue digging,' Langner said in an email.
The threat isn't limited to power plants. Even prisons and jails are vulnerable.
Another research team, based in Virginia, was allowed to inspect a correctional facility - it won't say which one - and found vulnerabilities that would allow it to open and close the facility's doors, suppress alarms and tamper with video surveillance feeds.
During a tour of the facility, the researchers noticed controllers like the ones in Iran. They used knowledge of the facility's network and that controller to demonstrate weaknesses.
They said it was crucial to isolate critical control systems from the Internet to prevent such attacks.
'People need to deem what's critical infrastructure in their facilities and who might come in contact with those,' Teague Newman, one of the three behind the research.
Another example involves a Southern California power company that wanted to test the controllers used throughout its substations. It hired Mocana Corp., a San Francisco-based security firm, to do the evaluation.
Kurt Stammberger, a vice president at Mocana, told The Associated Press that his firm found multiple vulnerabilities that would allow a hacker to control any piece of equipment connected to the controllers.
'We've never looked at a device like this before, and we were able to find this in the first day,' Stammberger said. 'These were big, major problems, and problems frankly that have been known about for at least a year and a half, but the utility had no clue.'
He wouldn't name the utility or the device maker. But he said it wasn't a Siemens device, which points to an industrywide problem, not one limited to a single manufacturer.
Mocana is working with the device maker on a fix, Stammberger said. His firm presented its findings at the ICS Cyber Security Conference in September.
Even if a manufacturer fixes the problem ! in new d evices, there's no easy way to fix it in older units, short of installing new equipment. Industrial facilities are loath to do that because of the costs of even temporarily shutting its operations.
'The situation is not at all as bad as it was five to six years ago, but there's much that remains to be done,' said Ulf Lindqvist, an expert on industrial control systems with SRI International. "We need to be as innovative and organized on the good-guy side as the bad guys can be.'
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