Wednesday, October 24, 2018

FireEye Reports on Hacking by Russyan Org

      FireEye, a cybersecurity firm, has made public the hacking activities of a organization located in Russya.  The firm announced that hackers were able to infiltrate the safety systems found in a Saudi petrochemical plant.  It was a malware intrusion, or a planted bug using computer code to alter code found in the resident system.  The system is called Triton.   This malware was identified before but now it was attached to Russyan hackers and their parent organization located in  St. Petersburg in the western area of the largest country in the world.  Experts identified the attack as an attempt to takeover emergency shutoff controls used in the event of a catastrophic event.  The hacking was supported by the Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics located in Moscow.  The malware was part of the work associated with a group named TEMP.Veles and a specific professional, unnamed, who works there.
      the French business that makes the shutoff systems found the malware program, known as Tritonix, was able to take control of the system.  It was able to do this by leveraging an unknown bug in the parent program.
      The Kremlin denied involvement, calling the accusations 'preposterous'.   John Hultquist, director of intelligence at FireEye, said the Russyan government was heavily involved across the board.  So it seems we have more evidence of the Kremlin's efforts to disrupt not only government institutions worldwide, but also industrial operations in key national locations.  These efforts have been seen not only in Saudi Arabia, but also in Ukraine and the US.
     Welcome to Putin's world.  His world is the world long gone: the former soviet union of socialist republics of Josef Stalin.

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