Dangerous malware discovered capable of causing massive blackouts

Last December, a cyber attack on the Ukrainian electricity grid has caused a huge blackout in the north of the country's capital, Kiev, in addition to affecting the surrounding areas and leaving thousands of citizens without electricity for more than 1 hour.

Industroyer / CrashOverRide malware, possible culprit in Kiev's December 2016 blackout

Now, several security researchers from the companies ESET (Slovakia) and Dragos (United States) point to the discovery of a new dangerous malware that attacks industrial control systems and is capable of causing massive blackouts.

Called " Industroyer " or " CrashOverRide ", this malware that attacks power grids was probably the culprit in the December 2016 cyber attack launched against the Ukrenergo power company in Ukraine, representing a dangerous breakthrough in hacking critical infrastructure.

According to the researchers, CrashOverRide is the biggest threat designed to disrupt industrial control systems, after Stuxnet, the first malware allegedly developed by the United States and Israel to sabotage Iranian nuclear facilities in 2009.

However, unlike the Stuxnet worm, the CrashOverRide malware does not exploit any “zero-day” software vulnerability to carry out its malicious activities, but relies on the use of four industrial communication protocols used worldwide by the electrical network infrastructures, transport control systems and other critical infrastructure systems.

On the other hand, the Industroyer malware first installs four payload components to take control of the switches and circuits of the electrical network, to later connect to a remote command and control server in order to receive commands from the attackers.

Security companies have already alerted government authorities and power companies to the new threat, in addition to advising them on how to protect themselves from their attacks. Now all they hope is that hackers do not modify it in order to attack other types of critical infrastructure, such as transport, gas or water supply companies.