Someone is hacking US electrical generating plants, and the chief suspect is Russia.
Hackers wrote highly targeted emails messages containing fake résumés for control engineering jobs and sent them to the senior industrial control engineers who maintain broad access to critical industrial control systems, the government report said.
The fake résumés were Microsoft Word documents that were laced with malicious code. Once the recipients clicked on those documents, attackers could steal their credentials and proceed to other machines on a network.
In some cases, the hackers also compromised legitimate websites that they knew their victims frequented — something security specialists call a watering hole attack. And in others, they deployed what are known as man-in-the-middle attacks in which they redirected their victims’ internet traffic through their own machines.
It appears, however, that control systems for the plants were not accessed. Common practice is to separate the control systems from anything connected to the internet.
Russian hackers actually have taken down parts of the Ukrainian electrical grid, so this is a real danger. It is the kind of thing one president might warn another president against doing, as President Barack Obama did President Putin last fall about the Russian interference with the election. Somehow, I don’t think this will be on the agenda for tomorrow.
CNN renews a story that’s been around for a while of throngs of Russian spies entering the country in place of Afghan girl robotics experts. Seems to be easy enough for the Russians to get visas and wander around uninhibited, mapping power lines and other points of interest.
Tonight Rachael Maddow said that numerous journalists have had skillfully forged documents supposedly on the Russia connection. Presumably the purpose is to discredit the organizations dumb enough to use them. All the surviving Nixon dirty tricks partners seem to have joined up with Trump, so it’s entirely possible that they are responsible for the documents.
Someone “shopping carefully forged documents” to news organizations of @realDonaldTrump campaign collusion with #Russia, says @maddow.
— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) July 7, 2017
Anyhoo, tomorrow the two presidents meet. From what I’ve seen, it will just be Trump and Tillerson, Putin and Lavrov, and their interpreters. At least I hope the US team has their own interpreters. Apparently no note-takers, though.
Total government experience in the room?
Russia: 80+ years
US: Less than 12 months https://t.co/RTE5Q6Dzy4
— Ivo Daalder (@IvoHDaalder) July 6, 2017
And open thread.