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CIA: Hackers Demanding Cash Disrupted Power

Pay up, or the RTU gets two in the head.

Tom Donahue, a senior CIA analyst who addressed a gathering last week described how hackers had turned out the lights in a few cities outside the US.

From MSNBC:

All the break-ins occurred outside the United States, said senior CIA analyst Tom Donahue. The U.S. government believes some of the hackers had inside knowledge to cause the outages. Donahue did not specify what countries were affected, when the outages occurred or how long the outages lasted. He said they happened in “several regions outside the United States.”

“In at least one case, the disruption caused a power outage affecting multiple cities,” Donahue said in a statement. “We do not know who executed these attacks or why, but all involved intrusions through the Internet.”

A CIA spokesman Friday declined to provide additional details.

No doubt the SCADA mailing list will most likely brush this off as a media hype event and, to a certain degree it is. But, the greater visibility of SCADA systems among the furry toothed hacker set is a very real problem that folks are going to have to take seriously one way or another.

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[tags]CIA, SCADA Hackers, SCADA Security, Hackers[/tags]

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