[ISN] Spike In Power Grid Attacks Likely In Next 12 Months

http://www.darkreading.com/security/vulnerabilities/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223000369

By Kelly Jackson Higgins
DarkReading
Feb 19, 2010

Attacks against the power grid are likely to rise and intensify during 
the next 12 months as smart grid research and pilot projects advance, 
according to utility security experts and a recently published report 
that analyzes threats to critical infrastructure.

The so-called Project Grey Goose Report on Critical Infrastructure 
points to state and/or non-state sponsored hackers from the Russian 
Federation of Independent States, Turkey, and China as the main threats 
to targeting and hacking into energy providers and other critical 
infrastructure networks.

Jeffrey Carr, principal investigator for Project Grey Goose and founder 
and CEO of GreyLogic, says he and other researchers working on the 
report initially focused on answering the question of whether there have 
been any successful cyberattacks on the utilities. "Some companies say 
there's never been a successful attack against the grid, but that's not 
true," he says. "There have been at least 120 instances" of successful 
attacks, some of which are documented in the report and date back to 
2001.

Several utility security experts agree that utility security 
administrators will have their hands full during the next year, as the 
transition from isolated, closed energy-generation and transmission 
networks to IP-based and wireless ones begins to take shape in the form 
of pilot smart grid projects.

[...]


________________________________________ 
Did a friend send you this? From now on, be the 
first to find out! Subscribe to InfoSec News 
http://www.infosecnews.org