That reads like a scare story for MPs so they approve more money to some dodgy outfit that will save us all from the ever growing axis of evil...again.
This is greatly downplaying the hacking that has been made public, hasn’t been made public, and is continuously ongoing. Water treatment plants just publicly got hit in Canada and USA.
The simple truth right now is that China, Iran, and North Korea, are actively hacking out companies and infrastructure. It’s a sort of Cold War.
Are you being diliberately obtuse? The U.S under Bush Jr. called them a member of the Axis of Evil. In response they called themselves and their allies the Axis of Resistance.
What goes around, comes around. What was the name of the SCADA hack dropped via USB drives in Iranian parking lots which brought down their centrifuges?
If I were an incompetent manager that need to oversee crumble infrastructure, I'd like to blame my problems on evil hackers from the other side of the world.
In what way does it not look real? On the contrary a significant portion of the population seems to be totally swooned by Iranian propaganda and is not aware they are a malicious actor and have been for decades conducting much worse things on foreign soil than hacks
I don’t think anyone in the west are swooned by Iran. Heck, a lot of Iranians aren’t even swooned by the Iranian propaganda.
What I think you’re doing is misinterpreting the wests disgust at Trumps war with Iran as favouring Iran when in fact what we actually feel is disdain for both parties.
It's more that a lot of people stopeed being swooned by US propaganda, and woke up to the fact that the US is a malicious actor and have been for decades, conducting much worse things on foreign soil than hacks.
I, personally, have a lot more mistrust towards the US than I have towards Iran. Mostly because Iran has very limited power to affect me negatively.
How would Iranian propaganda even enter the British population given the sparse cultural ties, saturation of media with domestic messaging, and the British government explicitly forcing public service content onto newsfeeds[1]? My expectation would be that Iranian propaganda makes zero inroads except with migrants from the region.
> How would Iranian propaganda even enter the British population
Haven't you heard ?They run the BBC, the Sky news, the Daily Mirror and the Sun. They also elect the parliament and the prime minister and send illegal imigrants to take the work of hard working citizens. /s
It is either the fact most major infrastructure in the UK seems to be run on computer systems introduced by a man with no knowledge and struggles to turn on a computer. Or it is the start of a UK government attempt to reduce freedoms by stating look there are naughty terrorists out there that will do harm to the UK if we don't restrict programs and usage of systems.
I imagine the former, but it will be used for the latter.
There are plenty of reports that this happens and at least as of a couple years ago wasn't even that uncommon. Including CCC talks. People want to do remote maintenance, and apparently not everyone has a good enough internal IT to put this traffic on a VPN
I find it difficult to believe that a power plant doesn't have enough resources to employ at least one person who could implement a VPN - even if it's just some cousin of a senior manager.
A VPN is not some foolproof system that guarantees you can't be hacked. If you're connected to the internet, people can probe your systems. Heck, Stuxnet proved they can do it even if you aren't.
Because power plants need to coordinate to serve the grid, and there is currently a single Interconnected Network of computers out there. Would it be a good idea to create a secondary network for power control and similar critical functions, completely isolated from the internet and from any outside countries? Perhaps - but it doesn't even seem to be on the horizon for now.
It's much more than cables. You'd need an entire separate internet - ISPs, BGP, DNS, TLS PKI infrastructure, and probably many others. You'd also still need to very carefully keep this separate, as simply connecting an Internet and a "UK Power Plant Internet v2" cable into the same router or even laptop might invalidate all of the isolation you spent time building. Which is itself a losing battle, given that you need everyone's house to also be connected to this network.
You, of course, then also need to ensure redundancy on this "UK Power Plant Internet v2", as you don't want to have a single point of failure such that a single router or cable somewhere being interrupted would create a network partition.
And again, there is simply no one even considering this. All of the work going into smart grid coordination (strictly necessary for incorporating a large amount of renewable power generation in the grid) is 100% designed to work on top of the public Internet.
This point cannot be overstated - famously the Torygraph for its stance should always have been treated with a degree of scepticism under former editors but such journalistic standards it ever had are now long and completely defunct. A rubbish-laden agitprop comic.
Actually if you read your own link - the BBC is just saying that the Telegraph reported this.
And the same BBC article says that the Telegraph reported it as "the power plant was shut down for four days", whereas on the other hand, the UK Government DESNZ said it only "affected a small-scale generator" not even an entire power plant.
It's always difficult in these situations to read through the FUD and see what the truth is.
Please, not this juvenile “I disagree with the political leaning of a newspaper so I demand everyone else boycott it” student union behaviour.
All sources have their biases. I could come up with several examples of the BBC and Guardian reporting very dubiously, for example (recently the BBC spliced together clips of the US President to make it seem he said something completely fictitious). Few sources are a paragon of truth.
How about we just think critically, and think -independently- about the media we consume. Ignore the authoritarian blow-hards who think their choice of media is the only valid choice for the rest of us.
The media is trying to manufacturer consent for a deeply unpopular war of choice that has already been lost. That's so weird. Why would Iran do this? They've already won.
Nothing will change the fact that this war has been a complete strategic defeat for the US and its allies. This is the beginning of the end of dismantling the world order created by the US for the benefit of the US after 1945. That's how this will be written about in history books.
I run a power grid. We have our own fiber optic network, run on the towers. 100% air gapped. No working from home. No IOT. Nothing fancy. SCADA control center staffed 24/7. If I want to know something I call them. This is the only way.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 1045 ms ] threadThe simple truth right now is that China, Iran, and North Korea, are actively hacking out companies and infrastructure. It’s a sort of Cold War.
What for?
You forgot Russia. /s Why do "companies and infrastructure" need to run "in a browser" ?
They could do with a dose of reality, IMHO.
Stuxnet.
This story does not look real.
What I think you’re doing is misinterpreting the wests disgust at Trumps war with Iran as favouring Iran when in fact what we actually feel is disdain for both parties.
Oh, wait…
I, personally, have a lot more mistrust towards the US than I have towards Iran. Mostly because Iran has very limited power to affect me negatively.
1: https://foundationforfreedomonline.com/fines-bans-forced-new...
Haven't you heard ?They run the BBC, the Sky news, the Daily Mirror and the Sun. They also elect the parliament and the prime minister and send illegal imigrants to take the work of hard working citizens. /s
I imagine the former, but it will be used for the latter.
Let's have NORAD on dial-up, what could go wrong?
You, of course, then also need to ensure redundancy on this "UK Power Plant Internet v2", as you don't want to have a single point of failure such that a single router or cable somewhere being interrupted would create a network partition.
And again, there is simply no one even considering this. All of the work going into smart grid coordination (strictly necessary for incorporating a large amount of renewable power generation in the grid) is 100% designed to work on top of the public Internet.
The people who give us this sort of wisdom discredit themselves by proving they relate like credulous children to whatever news source they are using.
All news sources are not equal.
[1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce9793g34yvo
And the same BBC article says that the Telegraph reported it as "the power plant was shut down for four days", whereas on the other hand, the UK Government DESNZ said it only "affected a small-scale generator" not even an entire power plant.
It's always difficult in these situations to read through the FUD and see what the truth is.
I would find it more trustworthy a report from my toilet hours after I ate alphabet soup.
And i bet that a lot of "Eastern European" "news outlets", which have nothing to do with it, reported it. Funny how propaganda works.
This just seems like a wasted attack, alerting us to the vulnerability.
[1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce9793g34yvo
All sources have their biases. I could come up with several examples of the BBC and Guardian reporting very dubiously, for example (recently the BBC spliced together clips of the US President to make it seem he said something completely fictitious). Few sources are a paragon of truth.
How about we just think critically, and think -independently- about the media we consume. Ignore the authoritarian blow-hards who think their choice of media is the only valid choice for the rest of us.
* Iran caused fall of German manufacturing
* Iranian investors caused housing shortage in Netherlands
* Iranians are pushing French to protest against pension age reforms
God forbid they cause an Independent Party.
Nothing will change the fact that this war has been a complete strategic defeat for the US and its allies. This is the beginning of the end of dismantling the world order created by the US for the benefit of the US after 1945. That's how this will be written about in history books.
And sure oil prices have gone up, but not doomsday scenario prices.
A bit of a pyrrhic victory if you insist on defining that as a victory.
There's not always a winner and a loser, sometimes everyone loses.