![]() ![]() #Hollywood story cheats no generator generatorHe checked with a safety engineer that the area around the lab’s diesel generator was clear of bystanders. The test director read out the time: 11:33 am. #Hollywood story cheats no generator codeThe secret experiment was given a code name that would come to be synonymous with the potential for digital attacks to inflict physical consequences: Aurora. Now, in the visitor center of the lab’s test range, he and his fellow engineers were about to put his most malicious idea into practice. That disturbing question was one Assante had carried over to Idaho National Laboratory from his time at the electric utility. A protective relay functions as a kind of lifeguard for the grid.īut what if that protective relay could be paralyzed-or worse, corrupted so that it became the vehicle for an attacker’s payload? If lines overheat or a generator goes out of sync, it’s those protective relays that detect the anomaly and open a circuit breaker, disconnecting the trouble spot, saving precious hardware, even preventing fires. ![]() Protective relays are designed to function as a safety mechanism to guard against dangerous physical conditions in electric systems. In particular, Assante had been thinking about a piece of equipment called a protective relay. The group included officials from the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Energy, and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), executives from a handful of electric utilities across the country, and other researchers and engineers who, like Assante, were tasked by the national lab to spend their days imagining catastrophic threats to American critical infrastructure.Īn electrical substation at Idaho National Labs’ sprawling, 890-square-mile test site. He walked into an auditorium inside the visitors’ center, where a small crowd was gathering. On a piercingly cold and windy morning in March 2007, Mike Assante arrived at an Idaho National Laboratory facility 32 miles west of Idaho Falls, a building in the middle of a vast, high desert landscape covered with snow and sagebrush. Today, it still serves as a powerful warning of the potential physical-world effects of cyberattacks-and an eery premonition of Sandworm's attacks to come. It would come to be known as the Aurora Generator Test. The demonstration was led by Assante, the late, legendary industrial control systems security pioneer. The following excerpt from the book SANDWORM: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers, published in paperback this week, tells the story of that early, seminal grid-hacking experiment. And when one cybersecurity researcher named Mike Assante dug into the details of that attack, he recognized a grid-hacking idea invented not by Russian hackers, but by the United State government, and tested a decade earlier. ![]() Among those acts of cyberwar was an unprecedented attack on Ukraine's power grid in 2016, one that appeared designed to not merely cause a blackout, but to inflict physical damage on electric equipment. ![]() The document charged six hackers working for Russia's GRU military intelligence agency with computer crimes related to half a decade of cyberattacks across the globe, from sabotaging the 2018 Winter Olympics in Korea to unleashing the most destructive malware in history in Ukraine. Earlier this week, the US Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against a group of hackers known as Sandworm. ![]()
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