Cryptocurrency Mining Attacks for the First Time Detected on Industrial Control Systems

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Cryptocurrency Mining Attacks for the First Time Detected on Industrial Control Systems

By CircleID Reporter
February 08, 2018, 3:35 am PST Views: 12,838 Add Comment

A water utility in Europe was compromised by cryptocurrency malware mining attack; the attack is the first public discovery of an unauthorized cryptocurrency miner impacting industrial controls systems. Sean Michael Kerner from eWeek reports: “At this point, Radiflow’s investigation indicates that the cryptocurrency mining malware was likely downloaded from a malicious advertising site. As such, the theory ... is that an operator at the water utility was able to open a web browser and clicked on an advertising link that led the mining code being installed on the system. ... Cryptocurrency mining software does not steal data from a network, rather it consumes compute cycles. [T]he impact on the utility was degraded system performance, though given the size of the overall network and where the HMI systems connected, it might not have been a degradation that operators would have noticed on their own.”

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