An anonymous reader quotes Bleeping Computer: “Two researchers presenting at the Black Hat Europe security conference in London revealed a method of infecting industrial equipment with an undetectable rootkit component that can wreak havoc and disrupt the normal operations of critical infrastructure all over the world. The attack targets PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers), devices that sit between normal computers that run industrial monitoring software and the actual industrial equipment, such as motors, valves, sensors, breakers, alarms, and others.” Researchers say they packed their attack as a loadable kernel module [PDF], which makes it both undetectable and reboot persistent. The attack goes after PLC pin configurations, meaning the PLC won’t be able to tell which are the actual input and output pins, allowing the attacker full-control to make up bogus sensor data, send fake commands, or block legitimate ones. The researchers acknowledge that the attack is extremely complicated, but the article argues it would still be of interest to a state-sponsored actor. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Researchers Create An Undetectable Rootkit That Targets Industrial Equipment
