Security News > 2023 > November > Russian Hackers Sandworm Cause Power Outage in Ukraine Amidst Missile Strikes

The notorious Russian hackers known as Sandworm targeted an electrical substation in Ukraine last year, causing a brief power outage in October 2022.

"The actor first used OT-level living-off-the-land techniques to likely trip the victim's substation circuit breakers, causing an unplanned power outage that coincided with mass missile strikes on critical infrastructure across Ukraine," the company said.

The development marks Sandworm's continuous efforts to stage disruptive attacks and compromise the power grid in Ukraine since at least 2015 using malware such as Industroyer.

The intrusion is thought to have happened around June 2022, with the Sandworm actors gaining access to the operational technology environment through a hypervisor that hosted a supervisory control and data acquisition management instance for the victim's substation environment.

On October 10, 2022, an optical disc image file was used to launch malware capable of switching off substations, resulting in an unscheduled power outage.

"Two days after the OT event, Sandworm deployed a new variant of CaddyWiper in the victim's IT environment to cause further disruption and potentially to remove forensic artifacts," Mandiant said.

News URL

https://thehackernews.com/2023/11/russian-hackers-sandworm-cause-power.html