DDoS attack halts heating in Finland amidst winter
metropolitan.fi
metropolitan.fi
It is completely reasonable if the heat system every so often "phones home", so report on usage, but it shouldn't actually stop working, if the network connection isn't available.
You can blame, DDoS, hackers, network outages, the Russians, I don't care, it doesn't cover up the fact that your system has a stupid design.
1) So they can bill you. 2) Bad design
Billing is almost always the reason if the design is sane. And it's always a PITA.
Bad design is self-explanatory. Most programmers think in terms of features rather than function.
I have this discussion every day with people creating battery operated IoT devices.
Me: "What is your most important function?" Them: "Well, we need to do <feature X>" Me: "<sighing> No. Your most important function is to protect your battery. If the device is dead, nothing else matters. Nobody should be able to make you drain your battery without your permission. After that consideration, you can do something useful."
They didn't even have a firewall.
2. Everybody can be smart after the case :) I'm sure now the'll design something more safe.
How true is this? Every Finnish person I've ever met has mistrusted and feared Russia.
I'd be quite interested in their perspective on world politics. My impression is that Russia has a lot of propaganda and filtering of the media, and I assume it has a different character from the propaganda and filtering of the media in western countries (... where it happens just as well, but in a more decentralized, money-oriented fashion).
To clarify: I'm not fan of Trump, but I glad to see such reaction.
What I CAN see is the glee on the Russian discussion boards whenever an incident like that is mentioned in the news. It's either that or outright denial blaming the Finns (British, Estonians, etc.) for making these claims up out of "russophobia".
You said you are OK with event, which can cause a war, and you dislike Putin.
They frequently bring up how they beat the Germans and the Russians in WW2. And how Finnish vodka is the best. And how it sucks that the world's most popular sauna heater is made in Sweden, because Finnish sauna heaters are superior.
Of course after Trump, the general feeling about US is pretty close what we think about Russia...
That said, no reason not to be careful after what has happened in Ukraine etc we should of course be careful: Russia can wipe out half of Norway just by turning around while they sleep.
The civil war may or may not have been part of the plan, but the primary Russian goal was to secure their supply route to the Black Sea naval port.
A port that Ukraine had been happily leasing to the Russians since the dismantling of the USSR.
There are no such reason for Russia to enter Norway. They already have Murmansk as a naval port, and they export way more oil and natural gas than Norway.
That's why we try to be friends and we continue to be part of NATO
Yes, but this is the kind of basic issue that everyone designing any sort of networked system should be aware of. The network is not reliable, and if you assume it is you're just setting yourself up for failure.
The management system can then receive information and MAYBE control some aspects of the heating system. If you remove or crash the management system, the heating system just reverts back to being a "dumb" heating system.
My question is: Why in the name of all that is holy does the heating system stop working just because the remote management interface decides to reboot?
This has to be design by the same idiots that believe that an in car infotainment system should be hooked up to the drive computer in a Jeep.
If there's already a fire present, whether furnace decides to stop operating or not is usually irrelevant (you can get a gas leak from a damaged furnace even if it's off). I do not see why _remote_ control should be able to prevent a fire from starting: whatever is remotely controlling this furnace doesn't have more data than the furnace itself.
So, in this case, "burn at max rate" _is_ the safe setting to be used when the controller dies. The only unsafe situation that it will cause is that the hot utility water will be scaldingly hot, but there will be no increased danger of fire nor of CO poisoning.
In essential systems you have to build for robustness over efficiency.
The heating system of a building is not a typical DDoS target, and it's improbable that somebody living outside of that building had a take against the inhabitants, knew of the right IP(s) for that building, and the effect a DDoS would have.
It's more plausible that the control system was designed so badly that exposing it to the Internet (and the accompanying background noise from port scanners, be it botnets, spammers or IoT malware) caused it to break down.
Then, the operators saw the effect of the misconfiguration and proclaimed it was a DDoS, because you don't get fired for breaking down under a DDoS, as opposed to having miserable IT security in place. This is similar to getting hacked by "the Russians" (or other state-level evildoers) where it is widely accepted that you just can't prevent such incidents.
The systems that were attacked tried to respond to the attack by rebooting the main control circuit.
1) done by actual criminals 2) pointed elsewhere, and the heating system was just one of the many systems used to initiate the attack.
They weren't more specific as to who attacked and who was the actual intended victim, but they were pretty sure the heatimg systems going down was just collateral.
Welcome to the Internet of Shit.
Sounds like exactly the sort of thing I'd have done in my youth (if I had had the skills) if I would've discovered lax security in my own building's systems and it pissed me off.
IOT companies don't tend to have bug bounties et al, and shutting off the heat to some buildings seems like a mostly harmless way to get some publicity for the issue.
As an aside: lovely Netscape favicon on that site.
One thing is sure: we won't ever make 100% secure networks. For now, ransomware are few and only on a big scale, but they could indeed become a big problem with IoT. I'm not exactly sure why we need to connect those devices to the internet: sounds like a local network should be enough. And if we want to send usage data to some kind of aggregation service, devices still can issue POST requests to our connected desktop, or be bluetooth connected to our mobiles.
[1] for those who didn't watch it, the battlestar galactica is one of the only human spaceships not destroyed by robots, thanks to the fact its captain always refused to connect the ship on the network
Remote management hardware got infected with Mirai or the like.
It appears that it's been fixed. https://twitter.com/Symbiatch/status/796407575776526341
Also see https://twitter.com/internetofshit/status/796405149501706240
And actually this is not so far fetched, since there are already discussions about making these devices smart and remotely controllable so that the utility company could balance the electricity need.
From hacking boilers to stop water delivery, to locking people outside their doors.
The next few years will be very fun for "infoSec" people.
Edit: Amazon link https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FCQLSPC
I wouldn't call it "this exact topic", since the primary attack vector in the story are smart meters, but still can second your recommendation. The book is highly based on a study founded by the german government[0], analyzing the outcome of a great scale blackout. The study is also worth reading, unfortunately only a german version is available.
[0] http://www.tab-beim-bundestag.de/de/untersuchungen/u137.html