US assassination of Iran’s military general Qasem Soleimani rose enough fears already, with people anticipating a potential war that that could take them back to recession times. Though it’s highly unlikely, at least now, it’s sure that aggrieved nations will attack each others cyberinfrastructures.
Targeting General Utilities
Drogos, an industrial CyberSecurity firm perceives the industrial infrastructure of US firms could be a valuable target for adversaries at this tension times. More specifically, the electric, oil and gas utilities are potential to get attacked. Though the research reveals the infrastructure of these firms are far sophisticated than what Iran is capable of, they’re still warned not to ease completely.
While attacking the power grids to blackout the nation is one choice, Iran couldn’t do that considering the advanced softwares that bar their malware. Yet, leveraging the tensions and attacking from China, Russia or North Korea could be possible. So the corporate firms and federal institutions are warned of patching to the latest softwares and using high graded firewalls to defend the likely attacks.
Account And VPN Breaches
As Drogo’s observed and wired reported, the state-backed hacker group – Magnallium (or APT33/Refined Kitten/Elfin) was found password spraying on thousands of accounts related to US power and other utilities firms. Further, the malware group, in association with Parisite, is trying to infiltrate into US power and oil utility firms by exploiting the VPN vulnerabilities these firms are currently possessing.
Aside from boasting about having a tough infrastructure, analysts believe that hackers have already entered the networks in past and are waiting within for a right moment to launch their attacks. Much new malware is advanced enough to go undetectable for years even by deep scans. As Rob Lee, founder of Drogos said, “
My concern with the Iran situation is not that we’re going to see some new big operation spin up. My concern is with access that groups might already have.”
