This in last week from Wired Blog:
Earlier this week, the nation's chief spy screeched about of the danger of cyber attacks -- and the need to monitor what everyone does online, in response. Now, the CIA has made an usually public warning about the perils that network strikes can pose. Hackers have tried to extort money from overseas utility companies. At least in one case, the Washington Post reports, the online attackers messed with an electrical grid, disrupting ing power in several cities.
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/01/hackers-take-do.html
Very scary indeed. Water systems and nuclear facilities (to name just a few snippets
of US infrastructure) have many computer-absed systems that, if accessed, could be
used for some badness.
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Here's another piece on hackers and the power grid, with a little more info.
CIA official: North American power company systems hacked
By Jill R. Aitoro
Hackers have targeted computers that operate power companies worldwide, causing at least one widespread electricity outage, a Central Intelligence Agency senior analyst told North American government and public works representatives in New Orleans this week.
The SANS Institute, a nonprofit cybersecurity research organization in Bethesda, Md., planned to release a report late Friday quoting CIA senior analyst Tom Donohue, who spoke Jan. 16 to 300 government officials, engineers and security managers from electric, water, oil and gas, and other utility companies based in the United States, United Kingdom, Sweden and Netherlands.
"We have information, from multiple regions outside the United States, of cyber intrusions into utilities, followed by extortion demands," Donohue said at the SCADA 2008 Control System Security Summit in New Orleans. SCADA stands for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, and generally refers to the systems that control critical U.S. infrastructure.
Full story: http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=39081&dcn=e_hsw
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