Saudi Arabia cyber attack goal was chemical plant explosion; experts fear retry
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/stuxn...
> The attack was a dangerous escalation in international cyberwarfare, as faceless enemies demonstrated both the drive and the ability to inflict serious physical damage.
Can you reasonably call this an "escalation" after Stuxnet? Maybe? But not even mentioning Stuxnet? At best, that seems like poor reporting.
> It was meant to sabotage the firm’s operations and trigger an explosion.
This seems quite different than Stuxnet, which was very carefully created for a specific purpose of damaging centrifuges at an Iranian nuclear enrichment facility in a very quiet manner, not causing explosions.
It's very important in this context, because the article goes out of its way to try to point the finger to Iran, but it fails to establish the context. That it was not only attacked on its Nuclear facilities, but also had cyberattack on its oil facilities via the "Flame" malware [0]
Which if this was an Iranian attack makes it a retaliation.
[0] http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/flame-virus-hit-iran-s-oil...
I don't think so. This fire has been burning for a very long time.
well, there is plenty of bad blood and a history of conflict.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–Saudi_Arabia_relations
this is just one more event to add to the record.
it also seems unlikely to me that saudi intelligence and other forms of support were not utilized in the planning, development and deployment of stuxnet (among other things).
nobody knows if saudi was involved, and i'm not saying they definitely were, but it seems rather unlikely that there was no assistance at least with regard to intelligence and other ancillary-ish things.
even so, the notion of "retaliation" in the scope of clandestine conflict and power struggle is very nebulous, as geopolitics has many layers. if nothing else, saudi is almost certainly a much more ideal target of opportunity than the US due to it's being a nearby direct competitor for regional influence. and even if saudi really had zero involvement with stuxnet (seems unlikely to me), they've definitely had allied involvement with other activities that worked against iran or it's interests.
media strategically omits a variety of things to support whatever messaging they're going for.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/...
With several countries probably able and willing to kill people with cyber-attacks, it's probably not long before an attack succeeds, blurring the distinction between cyber and "real" war.
From the Iranian perspective, it might be easy for them to group the USA with Israel and Saudi Arabia as quasi-enemies and not have a cared-for distinction. Especially since policies and actions by all 3 countries have been, at best, not aligned with Iranian interests and - at worst - belligerent to Iran. I really would disagree that the Stuxnet incident is irrelevant if Iran is indeed responsible.
So here is to the nameless, rotting in some oubliette, making mistakes, so others can return to theire familys at night, a secret brotherhood of servants to ruthless masters.
Cheers.
> The only thing that prevented an explosion was a mistake in the attackers’ computer code, the investigators said.
> The only thing that prevented significant damage was a bug in the attackers’ computer code that inadvertently shut down the plant’s production systems.
Red Star Airacobra: Memoirs of a Soviet Fighter Ace 1941-45: v. 2 Evgeniy Mariinskiy Kindle book.
Of course, there are many more: the brief resistance on D-Day from many non-German troops counts, the betrayal to the British embassy of Germany's rocket program, the Garbo mission (main agent betrayed program), Canaris maybe betraying Hitler from the start, Heisenberg's "miscalculation" and slowness that killed the Germany Atomic Bomb program (along with his offer of mutual sabotage to Bohr), etc.
That's globally. I imagine the sense of responsibility decreases in ethically-gray areas like nation-state warfare against adversaries, and among developers working in strongly hierarchical, military(-esque) environments, for autocratic regimes focused on destroying national/ethnic/religious enemies (as this appears to have been done by).
Workers in such a facility should not have their general purpose phones and computers with them.
This is not a panacea - there are conceivable attack vectors for non networked equipment - but it raises the bar significantly and should be the bare minimum of acceptability for designing and running these plants.
Ok.
> The equipment and tools should not even have a network stack
How do you imagine sensors and actuators will be operated instead ? People running about everywhere with handheld radios, reading gauges and turning valves ?
I know a guy who develops simulators for refinery operation. He explained to me how each refinery is a unique setup, cold-starting one takes a couple of days of non-stop valve twiddling with eyes on gauges and has plenty of ways to end in a fiery inferno if you do it wrong. Computerized control systems are not optional.
They were before computerized control systems existed.
People have been cracking petroleum molecules since 1891.
Don't bring a thermal overrun detection to the central computer and have it shutdown a burner. Do this locally
At least we've got a set of verified, battle-tested, multi-platform TCP/IP stacks. More importantly, they have been built with generalisation in mind, meaning that a single implementation would encapsulate all of the use-cases.
But instead we've got those half-baked implementations of "oh my god, it takes me only a few hours to establish a radio link" protocols just increasing the attack surface.
You're speaking of a semi-technical solution to a problem that is directly caused by the race to the bottom in the manufacturing industry (they probably have installed that equipment a few decades ago, just before they fired the last of the employees).
That's not even an argument. You can put a buffer overflow in anything. The key thing is this: the larger your code is, the more likely you are to have one. Using serial lines isn't going to make your code larger if you're just taking sensor readings or something. Far from it.
> At least we've got a set of verified, battle-tested, multi-platform TCP/IP stacks.
Think about this in terms of Linux or any other Unix or bigger RTOS, if that's most straightforward: in the kernel, there's much, much less code needed to make a UART appear as a device node than there is to make an entire TCP/IP stack and network PHY work. In the kernel it's all "battle-tested" code, none of it more so than the UART drivers. In terms of software quality, relying on the serial port and not using the TCP/IP stack means you're exposed to fewer potential errors simply because there's much, much less code being used.
(edit: the same basic idea applies if you're talking about something more sophisticated than a UART, like a CAN bus, which is still way less code than a TCP/IP stack)
> But instead we've got those half-baked implementations of "oh my god, it takes me only a few hours to establish a radio link" protocols just increasing the attack surface.
In terms of system engineering, you're exposed to fewer potential attack vectors if someone needs to plug into your system via a serial line versus accessing the system from anywhere you're connected to using the highly fragile resource of TCP/IP routing, but even connecting via a short-range radio link need not be much more complicated than that. Use a radio modem that connects via serial if you're using a real computer. Similarly, if it's a tiny embedded thing the radio is probably exposed via a serial interface.
Adding TCP/IP just adds code and attack vectors. That's fine if you truly need it...
I don't have to imagine it - I can just look back to how it was done before the widespread adoption of general purpose computers and their networks.
The systems, and their controls, should be as dumb as possible and should fail in as boring manner possible.
That merely hardens the target, but does not protect it. Stuxnet was delivered via USB to an Iran nuclear facility and had the exact same intent of triggering physical damage, which it apparently did successfully.
A decade ago, disconnecting from the Internet would have been considered security, but things have progresses and security needs to as well.
In my admonition against networked, general purpose computers, I purposely neglected to also mention that the plant engineers should not shoot themselves in the face, with an actual gun, upon starting their work shift.
I neglected to mention this in the same way that I neglected to mention that you should not have a PC running Windows anywhere near your critical infrastructure.
The failures that allowed stuxnet to occur were NOT "casualties on the battlefield of modern cyber warfare" - they were the clownish actions of idiots who got owned by autorun.inf[1] (among other things).
[1] http://www.eweek.com/security/how-stuxnet-malware-used-autor...
I agree with you that they should not be connected, but you can have things disconnected and still be read-only. IE, one way optical feeds.
Otherwise, you'll always have some goon plugging in a wi-fi router, rigging it to a sat phone with a modem, all just to play quake with their friends, while they idle on some crane barge, or wherever their stuck, bored on some hurry-up-and-wait project plan.
Even then, you'll still have wonder about silicon bugs, or tempest and row-hammer style attacks, for anything software ever touches, when a given industry fails to identify such threats themselves.
If you come up with a different network, then the attackers will just switch to that network.
Remember, the internet used to be lots of different networks. I'm old enough to remember bang paths, BITNET, and e-mail taking a week or more to make it across the Atlantic. Even back then, there were vulnerabilities, and even cross-network vulnerabilities.
And a private satellite is a terrible idea for "security." In a previous life I used to have to operate a satellite uplink, and I can tell you that replacing a transponder's intended content with your rogue content is really quite easy if you just put your mind to it. (It's happened before.)
Yes, I get that electronic signaling is electronic signaling, and none of it is actually different, at the transmission layer. It's just more DSP and more fast fourier transforms under the hood.
Yes, technical barriers can be eroded with adapters and facades, but it's an added cost to attack, and reduces detective work in that you have to know someone to jump the learning curve and enter the attack envelope. That means detective work can happen within a smaller social graph, and that alone becomes a deterent from sharing information, because everything becomes need-to-know, and insider awareness is a give away for inside jobs.
It's also easier to stamp out, and ostracize insiders, if they have loose lips or have a tendency to lend and give away the car keys.
Not everything needs to be as cheesy as Encryption DRM for optical movie disks and video games. For critical infrastructure safety is important enough to warrant independent military-grade safe guards.
Do military protocols fail? Yes, we have the enigma machines sitting in enough museums to prove it.
This in not an XKCD "too many standards can be solved with one more standard" concept. Isolation and specialization can be effective defense concepts.
Thank you - appreciated.
Many people (unwittingly ?) argue against defense-in-depth because they look at individual layers of the defense and declare them inadequate. They are always correct.
What they are missing is that nobody ever proposed only using (port knocking, or stack obfuscation, or fake login banners, or whatever). They are always additive layers of security on top of the existing set of best practices.
Any reading material behind this? Really interesting, would like to read up on what caused such a delay
A large part of the delay is that messages were transmitted in a store-and-forward scheme (often via uucp). And most machines didn't send messages more than once a day because connectivity was expensive and measured in dollars per minute. And when they did connect to the next machine, it was usually not a very long hop. Sometimes one part of a campus to another. Or to a computer in the next town.
I really don't know exactly how the messages crossed oceans. Satellite transmission would have been unthinkable. My guess is that eventually they hit some big east coast computing center like MIT or BBN and went via undersea cable, but that's speculation.
I ran a node of one of the pre-intenet networks. Like most of the other nodes, it was connected via 150 or 300 baud dialup modem. Later there were a few 1200's, but they were rare.
My node was important because it was oddly located so that it could span two states and two area codes without incurring toll charges. That made it very busy, so the early morning (2am) message transfer sometimes took a couple of hours.
I tried to write a couple of articles about the old American dialup networks on Wikipedia once, but someone in another country deleted them saying they didn't exist because he'd never heard of it and if there was no web site to link to as reference it didn't happen. I stopped contributing to Wikipedia after that.
https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/Large-Fire-at-Fertilizer-F...
Is this just incompetence/cost savings, or is there some other legitimate reason for building this vulnerability into so much of our global infrastructure?
“If attackers developed a technique against Schneider equipment in Saudi Arabia, they could very well deploy the same technique here in the United States,” said James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
Yet the NY Times forgets to cite their own article that shows Unite Arab Emirates, who is politically tied to Saudi Arabia was one of the largest donors to Center for Strategic and International Studies [0] as well as CSIS own listing [1]
All of the investigators believe the attack was most likely intended to cause an explosion that would have killed people
Times does not list which investigators they have spoken to directly.
and again, which intelligence analysts?
What worries investigators and intelligence analysts
Two weeks later, the same attackers hit other Saudi targets with the same computer virus. On Jan. 23, 2017, they struck again
How did they establish it was the same attackers?
The article then talks about the Shamoon attack attributed to Iran with links and attribution to an earlier article by one of the writers and then in it says,
The attack in August was not a Shamoon attack. It was much more dangerous.
If it was not a Shamoon attack, then why mention that. Or why not just say, past attacks were attributed to Iran.
Once again, Investigators believe a nation-state was responsible because there was no obvious profit motive Times does not indicate which "investigators" believes that.
Also, it seems like more and more "journalism" is relying on "believe" rather than evidence and facts.
Then once again, Cybersecurity experts said Iran, China, Russia the United States and Israel had the technical sophistication to launch such attacks
No quote or attribution to which expert or their level of experience.
The article ends horribly with, Tasnee said in an email that it had hired experts from Symantec and IBM to study the attack against it
"Study the attack", Which means the experts have not had a chance to review the evidence nor Times had spoken directly to these hired experts to get their answers. But they wrote a whole article with their own conclusions.
[0] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/us/politics/foreign-po...
[1] https://www.csis.org/support-csis/our-donors/government-dono...
"Times does not indicate which "investigators" believes that."
Not disclosing your sources is journalism 101. You will have to choose to trust or mistrust the professional integrity of NYT journalists and editors. Integrity is the NYT's main selling point, so make of that what you will.
Looks like they are in good hands then. The guys behind Norton Anti-virus and those excellent SSL certificates are definitely going to get to the bottom of this.
(Edit: meet length requirement)
According to the article, investigators believe the explosion would have killed people, and notes that fatalities are a common outcome of chemical plant explosions.
Most cyber attacks just inconvenience people, or cost a little bit of money. If they can kill, it is a tertiary or more remote effect.
That this one was trying to do something that had it succeeded would have very directly and immediately led to deaths is what makes it interesting to a wider audience.
It's the same form as "You won't believe number 9!" in a clickbait top 20 list. It is phrased in a way to make you wonder "what is item 9?"
There is a combination of emotional content and purposeful, unnecessary ambiguity.
There is a reason the headline is written in this way. This is big news.
Attacks meant to do physical harm or shutdown systems do not resort to 1990s trickery like copying an image billions of times. This is industrial vandalism and, even if a danger exists, should not be described as an attempt to murder people. Such damage, such unwanted activity within an information system, can happen without any ill intent by anyone. Therefore those designing large systems need to incorporate such failures into their plans. The failure of multiple drives due to some runaway process should never be capable of causing an explosion.
Cf. recent attempted murder with nerve agent in UK.