Erster Blackout nach Hacker-Angriff? (In der Ukraine)

Energy_ICT_sept2015

Das gehört auf die sicherheitspolitische Beobachtungsliste: Erstmals sollen, so weit bekannt, Hacker die Energieversorgung einer ganzen Region lahmgelegt haben – konkret Ende Dezember vergangenen Jahres in der Ukraine.

Aus dem Bericht der Washington Post:

Hackers caused a blackout for the first time, researchers say
Hackers caused a power outage in Ukraine during holiday season, researchers say, signalling a potentially troubling new escalation in digital attacks.
„This is the first incident we know of where an attack caused a blackout,“ said John Hultquist, head of iSIGHT Partner’s cyberespionage intelligence practice. (…)

Half of the homes in Ukraine’s Ivano-Frankivsk region were left without power for several hours on December 23rd, according to a local report that attributed the blackout to a virus that disconnected electrical substations from the grid.

und etwas technischer bei ArsTechnica:

First known hacker-caused power outage signals troubling escalation
Highly destructive malware that infected at least three regional power authorities in Ukraine led to a power failure that left hundreds of thousands of homes without electricity last week, researchers said.
The outage left about half of the homes in the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine without electricity, Ukrainian news service TSN reported in an article posted a day after the December 23 failure.
Researchers from antivirus provider ESET have confirmed that multiple Ukrainian power authorities were infected by „BlackEnergy,“ a package discovered in 2007 that was updated two years ago to include a host of new functions, including the ability to render infected computers unbootable.

Noch klingt das alles nicht nach bestätigten Informationen. Aber vielleicht gibt es ja in absehbarer Zeit da ein bisschen mehr Klarheit.