Page 156 - Cyber Terrorism and Extremism as Threat to Critical Infrastructure Protection

SECTION II: CYBER TERRORISM AND SECURITY IMPLICATION FOR CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE PROTECTION

During 2011, Canadian government reported a major cyberattack against its agencies, includ-
ing Defence Research and Development Canada, a research agency for Canada’s Department
of National Defense. The attack forced Canada’s main economic agencies, to disconnect from
the internet. In July 2011, the US Deputy Secretary of Defense stated that a defence contrac-
tor had been hacked and 24,000 files from the Department of Defense had been stolen. The
Russian firm Kaspersky discovered a worldwide cyber attack dubbed “Red October”, during
2012 which had been operating since at least 2007. The hackers gathered information through
vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Word and Excel programs. The primary targets of the attack
appeared to be Eastern Europe, the former USSR and Central Asia, although Western Europe
and North America also reported victims. The virus collected information from government
Embassies, research firms, military installations, energy providers, nuclear power stations
and other critical infrastructures. In 2013 the South Korean financial institutions came under
cyber-attacks, when the Korean broadcaster YTN had their networks infected, in an incident
said to resemble past cyber efforts by North Korea (Adair, 2009).

Figure 1: History of global cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure 1

In a direct cyber-attack, ISIS’ attempted to hack US electrical power companies in October
2015. In Europe, the most well-known event, until recently was the Ukrainian power grid
cyber-attack in December 2015, where attackers hacked the Ukrainian utilities’ networks,
gained access and manually switched off power to 43 electrical substations. In December
2016, Ukraine suffered another cyber-attack, this time it was fully automated, as hackers
struck an electricity transmission station north of the city of Kiev, blacking out a portion
of the Ukrainian capital equivalent to a fifth of its total power capacity (Ukrainian Ministry
of Energy and Coal, January 2016. http://mpe.kmu.gov.ua/minugol/control/ publish/ article?
artid= 245 082298).

1 https:is5com.com/uncategorized/nov-22-2017-cyber-immunity-a-holistic-view-for-industrial-control-systems/

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