US Govt. Denies Role of BlackEnergy Virus In Ukrainian Massive Blackout

Despite US Government warning officials about how a power grid can be hacked quite easily with a live demo under the guidance of National Security Agency and US Cyber Command chief Adm. Michael Rogers, many from the power sector had outrightly rejected this prospect calling it fake and an attempt of scaring the general public. However, when hackers actually hacked electric utilities in Ukraine last December, they actually portrayed how easy it is to take down mega-size equipments.

Now latest reports by US government indicate that the above said Ukrainian attack was not just a fluke, but it took place after a long set of planning, coordination and in a highly sophisticated manner. The report was released this Thursday and it gave a detailed overview as to how the cyber-attack got successful in taking down a certain portion of a national power grid. The well-planned strike, which blacked out more than 225,000 people affected three regional electronic power distribution companies within 30 minutes of each other on December 23.

Reports also state that all those websites that got affected due to hack-attack are now successfully running under constrained operations further adding that there were three other organizations that appeared to have been hacked, but on further introspection, it was found that they didn't suffer much impact on their daily operational behaviour.

When Ukrainian govt. was asked to comment, Anna Dudka official spokeswomen stated that the networks were compromised way back via emails that included the downloader for the virus BlackEnergy and was sent to all those employees whose emails were easily available online and at the end, used KillDisk to make the system completely inoperable. However, US officials vehemently denied the role of any virus behind the blackout.

In order to prevent such hack attacks on their firms, US government actually sent a team of cyber officials (inclusive of Department of Homeland Security, Department of Energy, and FBI) to work with Ukrainian govt. and conduct several interviews to piece together all the gathered information further analyzing the data.

However, officials added that hackers used Telephone Denial-of-Service (TDoS) attack in order to keep the after-effects of the attack for long. TDoS works in similar fashion as of DDoS as in DDoS a website or rather a web-server is overloaded with a flood of data and in TDOS, the central phone system is affected with bogus calls to prevent legitimate callers getting through and the same happened in the case of Ukrainian hacking attack.

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