New Russian malware could bring down the US power grid – By Jazz Shaw (Hot Air) / May 31, 2023
As if you didn’t have enough to worry about. Who will bring down America’s power grid first? Joe Biden or Vladimir Putin? Biden has a head start, to be sure. But some Russian hackers have reportedly cooked up some new malware designed specifically to target electrical grids and cause disruptions. The new threat was discovered by Mandiant, a cyber threat intelligence specialist firm. They believe that this new malware system “poses a plausible threat” to the operational technology behind various electrical grid assets.
Mandiant on Thursday detailed a new piece of malware that appears to be linked to Russia and is designed to target industrial control systems (ICS), specifically in an effort to cause electric grid disruption.
Named CosmicEnergy, the latest malware family targeting operational technology (OT) is designed to interact with IEC 60870-5-104 (IEC-104) devices, sending remote commands to tamper with the actuation of power line switches and circuit breakers in an effort to cause power disruption. Mandiant believes it “poses a plausible threat to affected electric grid assets”.
At least for the time being, the United States might not have quite as much to worry about from this threat as other parts of the world. According to the geeks at Mandiant, the new “CosmicEnergy” malware is highly customized and the configuration they discovered is designed to attack remote elements of power grids like the ones used in Europe, the Middle East and other parts of Asia.
