Kaspersky Lab Contest Reveals Ease Of Hacking Oil Refineries
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Tue, 08/14/2018
Authored by Herman Wang and Katherine Dunn via S&P Global Platts’ “The Barrel” blog,
In October, four South Korean hackers in Shanghai spent seven hours attempting to infiltrate an oil refinery’s corporate network to gain access to its control systems and shut the facility down.
Another 15 minutes or so, and they likely would have succeeded.
Fortunately for the industry, the attack was not real. It was performed in a live-televised cybersecurity competition put on by Internet security firm Kaspersky Lab. The competition pitted teams from around the world in a race to breach a model of a real oil refinery that is one of the company’s clients.
None of the three teams in the final managed to bring the refinery down; the South Korean team came closest and won the contest. But as the organizers note, real-world hackers do not operate under such tight time restrictions.
“The contest demonstrated once again that, by exploiting weaknesses in the corporate network’s protection and network configuration faults, a remote threat actor can gain unauthorized access to the industrial segment of the network,” Kaspersky’s industrial control system vulnerability research group manager, Vladimir Dashchenko, said.
The Rest…HERE
