The New York Times has published new details about an alleged cyberattack that unnamed US officials say has plunged parts of Venezuela into darkness ahead of the arrest of the country's president, Nicolás Maduro.
Among the key new details is that the cyber operation was able to knock out electricity for most residents of the capital Caracas for only a few minutes, although in some neighborhoods close to the military base where Maduro was captured, the outage lasted three days. The cyber operation also targeted Venezuelan military radar defenses. The newspaper said the US Cyber Command was involved.
More details?
“By cutting power in Caracas and disrupting radar, U.S. military helicopters were able to enter the country undetected on their mission to capture Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president now brought to the United States to face drug charges,” the NYT reported.
The NYT provided some additional details. Omitted were the methods supposedly used. For example, when Russia cut electricity supplies in December 2015, it used generic malware known as BlackEnergy to first penetrate the corporate networks of the targeted energy companies and then further compromise the supervisory control and data acquisition systems the companies used to generate and transmit electricity. The Russian attackers then used legitimate power distribution functionality to cause the outage, which cut power to more than 225,000 people for more than six hours before network workers restored it.
In a second attack, almost exactly a year later, Russia used a much more sophisticated piece of malware to take out key parts of Ukraine's power grid. It's called Industroyer and also called Crash Override. It is the first known malware framework designed to directly attack power grid systems.
