Alwaght- The US federal government officials has accused Russian hackers of breaching into the control rooms of the country's electric utilities where they could have caused blackouts, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
The American daily cited officials at the Department of Homeland Security as saying that the hackers who worked for a Russian state-sponsored group known as Dragonfly or Energetic Bear, broke into utilities' isolated networks in 2017 by hacking networks belonging to third-party vendors that had relationships with the power companies.
Hackers used conventional tools such as spear-phishing emails and watering-hole attacks that trick victims into entering their passwords and then gained access to corporate networks of suppliers, which allowed the hackers to steal credentials and gain access to utility networks, the report said.
Officials said the campaign had claimed "hundreds of victims" and is likely continuing, the Journal reported.
"They got to the point where they could have thrown switches" to disrupt the flow power, Jonathan Homer, chief of industrial-control-system analysis for The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), told the Journal.
DHS plans to conduct four briefings and is searching for evidence on the Russians attempting to automate their attacks, the report said. Investigators cited by the WSJ said was it was not clear whether this was done by the hackers in preparation for a bigger future attack.
The report comes amid increasing cyber-tensions between Moscow and Washington. A federal grand jury in the US indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers earlier in July on charges of hacking the computer networks of 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Russia’s role in the 2016 election and whether the campaign of Republican candidate Donald Trump colluded with Moscow. Russia denies meddling in the elections while President Trump has denied any collusion.
