Posted on 12/07/2021 8:15:01 PM PST by naturalman1975
Chinese hackers came within minutes of shutting down a series of power stations capable of lighting three million homes in a sneak cyber attack of a sort experts warn are becoming increasingly common – and which could be used to limit Australia’s ability to respond to a military crisis in the future.
On November 27, Queensland’s CS Energy was subjected to a sustained ransomware attack which sources familiar with the matter say was only stopped at the last minute before it had the potential to shut down the company’s two thermal coal plants.
Had the attack been successful, it could have taken 3500 megawatts of power out of the grid – enough to power between 1.4 and three million homes – illustrating the devastating potential of cyber attacks to cripple the nation.
While the company separated its corporate and operational systems before the hackers were able to affect power generation, sources familiar with the incident say the attackers were less than an hour away from being able to shut down the generators.
Even without hitting the generators, the attack managed to disable a number of the company’s corporate systems with many employees still not having access to emails.
The incident was not a one-off. Intelligence sources say the number of cyber attacks being directed at Australia have reached a disturbing level.
Assistant Minister for Defence Andrew Hastie told The Daily Telegraph: “The cyber threat environment has deteriorated significantly … I’m deeply concerned about the increasing pace of foreign influence attempts and espionage, as well as criminal and state sponsored cyber activity against Australia.”
(Excerpt) Read more at dailytelegraph.com.au ...
An act of war.
Locate (hackers) and nuke it from space. It’s the only way to be sure.
Time for some payback.
L
What is disturbing is just how brazen and open Communist China is about these things.
In Gen. Robert Spalding’s excellent book “Stealth War” he discussed a serious pattern of hacking from unknown sources in various government/corporate environments, and when they were analyzing it, they saw that the peak hacking was exactly aligned with the workday windows for Communist Chinese government workers.
Their attitude is “So what?”
It’s crazy how this is just talked about like “oh whatever”. No accountability on China at all. How is this different than launching a missile at their power grid that they were able to shoot down? Do you just say whatever and wait for the next one?
Yeah - cyberwar just seems to be accepted on the basis, it’s better than ‘real war’, rather than actually being part of it.
So, they’re implying that computer security is important?
Unlike locating a missile launch, it’s impossible to prove the exact origin of most cyber attacks. What appears to be the origin can simply be a machine remote controlled through a hundred other machines bouncing the signal from opposite sides of the planet. And even if intelligence followed and analyzed those 100 machines without a single compromise, they’ll likely end up at a dead end. A hacker can use long distance antennas to upload code far from the true access point and be gone months before the attack even begins.
Intelligence agencies will entirely spoof evidence to make it appear from another country. Everything including slang used in the code is spoofed to make it appear like someone else
Sure, I believe that.
But when I look at which country is also engaged in a trade war with Australia right now, and constantly making insulting statements through their diplomats, I think there’s a pretty obvious suspect here.
I wonder if Three Gorges dam can be hacked.
Exactly, which is why the source of the hacking was unknown.
But...while the source was unknown, a simple graph of the time of attacks showed (as an example) that the hacks were taking place at 8:00 PM to Midnight, then would slack off for about a half hour, then pick up again at 12:30 AM and continue on until 5 or 6 AM.
Just the workday over in Shanghai. (don’t know if I got those times right or not, no coffee yet)
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