How cyber criminals are targeting civilian infrastructure?
By MYBRANDBOOK
Attacking a civilian infrastructure is a war crime but countries around the world are fighting a silent and dirty game of pre-positioning themselves on civilian infrastructure like energy-producing civilian nuclear plants — to be able to commit sabotage during a moment of geopolitical tension.
In a recent news it came into light through a Tweeter update by Pukhraj Singh, a "noted cyber intelligence specialist" who was "instrumental in setting up of the cyber-warfare operations centre of the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), that India's Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KNPP) got hacked.
As per the news, the government was notified before-hand and extremely mission-critical targets were hit. Singh in his quote Tweet mentioned that he was aware of the attack as early as September 7, 2019, calling it a "causus belli" (an attack sufficiently grave to provoke a war). He also said that a third party contacted and notified National Cyber Security Coordinator on Sep 4.
At first the Nuclear Power Plant Corporation of India (NPCI) denied it and insisted the KNPP nuclear power plant is "stand alone and not connected to outside cyber network and internet" and that "any cyber attack on the Nuclear Power Plant Control System is not possible." Then they backtracked. On October 30, the NPCI confirmed that malware was in fact discovered on their systems, and that CERT-India first noticed the attack on September 4, 2019. In their statement, they claimed the infected PC was connected to the administrative network, which they say is "isolated from the critical internal network."
According to researchers at CyberBit, the malware appears to have been targeted specifically at the KNPP facility. The reverse-engineering of the malware sample brings forth that the hard-coded administrator credentials for KNPP's networks as well as RFC 1918 IP addresses. This highlights that the attacker prior to this broke in KNPP networks, scanned for NAT'ed devices, stole admin credentials, and then incorporated those details into this new malware, a second-stage payload designed for deeper and more thorough reconnaissance of KNPP's networks.
The malware hid inside of modified copies of legitimate programs, such as 7Zip or VNC. This technique often successfully escapes notice by antivirus scanners. Adequate checking of program signatures would have mitigated this attack vector; the modified program hash would have differed from the software vendor's signed hash. The fact that this attack was successful strongly suggests that KNPP was not checking software signatures of file hashes.
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