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Cybersecurity Specialists Solid Doubt on Hackers’ ICS Ransomware Claims

By Eduard Kovacs on January 16, 2023

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A hacktivist group has made daring claims relating to an assault on an industrial management system (ICS) machine, however business professionals have questioned their claims.

The hacktivist group referred to as GhostSec, whose latest operations have targeted on ‘punishing’ Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, claims to have performed the primary ever ransomware assault towards a distant terminal unit (RTU), a sort of ICS machine used for communications between subject units and supervisory management and knowledge acquisition (SCADA) programs.

“We simply encrypted the primary RTU in historical past! A small machine designed just for an ICS surroundings,” the hackers stated. “The age of ransomware coded to assault ICS units simply turned a factor, and we had been the primary.”

The group stated the hacked machine is situated in Belarus, one in every of Russia’s largest allies. Whereas the assault was described as ransomware as a result of information on the machine had been encrypted, there wasn’t an precise ransom demand.

A number of consultants, together with ones from ICS safety firms, analyzed the hacktivists’ claims primarily based on the screenshots they made accessible. The screenshots present that the attackers managed to encrypt a few of the information hosted on the machine, identical to in a ransomware assault.

The primary facet that the majority consultants identified is that the focused machine is the Teleofis RTU968, a product described by the Russia-based vendor as a 3G router designed for connecting industrial and business services to the web. Whereas the machine is labeled as an RTU and may technically be used as an RTU as a consequence of the truth that it helps industrial interfaces, it’s not particularly designed for this objective.

As well as, not like RTUs made by main distributors comparable to Siemens, which run working programs which are custom-built for industrial purposes, the Teleofis machine runs OpenWrt, a broadly used Linux working system designed for embedded units.

Ransomware that may encrypt information on a Linux machine will not be new and there’s no indication that encrypting information on the Teleofis machine is harder. As well as, hacking these kind of communication gateways that present distant connectivity to serial units can be not new, identified industrial cybersecurity agency SynSaber.

“Provided that these units are operating generic Linux kernels that occur to be offering connectivity to serial units (which, in fact, may very well be industrial), there’s nothing within the proof provided by GhostSec that industrial was particularly attacked or that this assault represents a brand new paradigm shift in industrial hacking,” defined Ron Fabela, the CTO of SynSaber.

Industrial cybersecurity firm Otorio has additionally analyzed the hackers’ claims and famous, “In an effort to create a ransomware kind of assault on a standard RTU, it will require GhostSec to have deeper OT information and assets, comparable to experimenting with actual OT engineering instruments and units. The Teleofis machine is OpenWrt primarily based, which is mainly Linux, and doesn’t introduce any new, actual OT functionality.”

Otorio believes the attackers gained preliminary entry to the router by leveraging weak authentication.

Cybersecurity firm Claroty’s investigation reached the identical conclusion. Its researchers discovered that the machine has a pre-configured SSH service that may be accessed utilizing a pre-configured root password that may be simply cracked.

Claroty has recognized practically 200 internet-exposed Teleofis RTU968 routers in Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus, and 117 of them had the SSH service enabled.

 [ Read: Hacktivist Attacks Show Ease of Hacking Industrial Control Systems ]

Researcher Joe Slowik has additionally analyzed GhostSec’s claims and located that the hackers’ ransomware apparently wasn’t even in a position to encrypt all information operating on the machine — in-use information weren’t encrypted, which limits the affect of the assault.

This isn’t the primary time GhostSec claims to have hacked ICS units. In September, they claimed to have hijacked programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and a human-machine interface (HMI) in Israel, however their claims once more appeared overblown.

Whereas GhostSec’s claims is probably not solely correct, ransomware assaults can and have prompted critical issues for industrial organizations and the economic programs they’re utilizing, even when ICS is in lots of circumstances circuitously focused.

As well as, researchers have proven that menace actors may in reality launch ransomware assaults aimed immediately at ICS units. Pink Balloon Safety confirmed one 12 months in the past how malicious actors may implement ransomware on a safety relay.

However, this analysis and the latest incidents don’t essentially imply that ransomware assaults immediately focusing on ICS units will develop into widespread and widespread within the close to future.

“The necessities and implications of ‘true’ industrial ransomware on the RTU or PLC degree make this a not possible area for criminals to function in,” Slowik stated. “The payoffs seem too meager to justify each the technical funding and political danger related to such an motion, as outlined above. As an alternative, it merely makes higher sense economically for such entities to stay in the identical area that they’ve resided in for a while: impacting IT and IT-like programs to elicit fee from organizations whereas making an attempt to keep away from ‘worst case’ societal impacts that convey higher consideration from governments and legislation enforcement.”

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