FINAL WORD
WHILE TRADITIONAL
COMPUTER ATTACKS
USUALLY RESULT IN
NON-MATERIAL DAMAGE,
STUXNET SHOWED
THE DESTRUCTIVE
CAPACITY OF ADVANCED
WORMS AND VIRUSES IN
AFFECTING CORPORATE
DATA…
the installation of flawed turbines but
not the accident.
1999: There were reports of an
attack on Gazprom, the Russian oil
corporation, where a Trojan horse
was installed on their pipeline system,
with the help of an insider. The
attack is reported to have disrupted
the control of gas flows for a few
hours, but this was never confirmed
by Gazprom.
Unintentional targets
Several SCADA systems have come
under attack by viruses that weren’t
specifically targeting them but
happened to find them.
2003: Davis-Besse Nuclear Power
Station and CSX Corporation in the
US were respectively victims of the
Slammer and Sobig worms. Slammer
caused a denial of service and slowed
down the network whereas Sobig sent
out spam via e-mail.
Physical impacts: None for DavisBesse Nuclear Power Station, although
Slammer took down the SCADA
network on another undisclosed
utility. The Sobig virus infected a
computer system in CSX Corporation’s
headquarters, shutting down
signalling, dispatching and other
systems, resulting in train delays.
2004: Transportation companies like
British Airways, Railcorp, Delta Airlines
were hit with the Sasser worm that
exploited a buffer overflow vulnerability
80
INTELLIGENTCIO
to propagate to other vulnerable
systems. Some aggressive variants may
have caused network congestion.
Physical impact: Failure to download
flight plans leading to grounded
aircraft
Physical impact: Train and flight delays
and flight cancellations in some cases.
Confirmed targeted attacks
Here are the attacks that were
specifically designed for and targeted
at SCADA systems:
2009: The French Navy was victim
of the Conficker worm. It exploited
a Windows vulnerability, or guessed
administrator passwords to install
itself. The worm could then propagate
to other vulnerable machines, selfupdate and download and install
further malware.
2009: Oil, gas, and petrochemical
companies such as Exxon, Shell, BP,
among others were hit by the Night
Dragon virus that was distributed
using spearphishing. The virus
allowed the infected computers to
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