Anonymous, NSA Square Off On Power Grid Attacks

Anonymous: 10 Facts About The Hacktivist Group

Could Anonymous add "blackouts" to its list of accomplishments?

The director of the National Security Agency, Gen. Keith Alexander, has cautioned that within a couple of years, hacktivist collectives such as Anonymous could pose a threat to power grids. His warnings have been made in private White House briefings, reported the Wall Street Journal.

But the Anonops blog, a reliable source of Anonymous-related information, Tuesday disputed that the group had any inclination to crash power grids. "Ridiculous! Why should Anonymous shut off power grid? Makes no sense! They just want to make you feel afraid," read a post to the blog.

Indeed, attacking power grids wouldn't seem to square with the group's modus operandi. To date, Anonymous has focused on sowing the seeds of anarchic online mayhem largely by doxing--releasing sensitive documents--and launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

[ Anonymous-linked hacktivists recently targeted stock exchanges. Read more at Anonymous-Backed Attacks Took Nasdaq Website Offline.]

To date, its targets have largely been symbolic, and its attacks seemingly designed to generate news headlines in support of Anonymous ideals. Accordingly, the group has launched DDoS attacks at payment card processors who blocked WikiLeaks funding, released an audio recording of an FBI conference call that discussed prosecutions of alleged LulzSec and Anonymous members, and regularly released documents and taken down the public websites of numerous law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Regardless, any talk of potential Anonymous attacks on power grids completely misses the point, said control system security expert Joe Weiss, who heads Applied Control Solutions, via phone. Notably, some of the industrial control systems used to manage power grids can already be hacked into using known vulnerabilities.

"This whole thing about [how] it's going to take [Anonymous] a year or two [to hack the power grid]? Well, it doesn't just have to be Anonymous. Anybody who knows enough about how to use some of these exploits can do that now. It's a scary thought. And that part is being missed."

Notably, Weiss said, published vulnerabilities for numerous control systems are already circulating online. "One of the things that just happened--and we're talking around Valentine's Day--is there were a number of controller vulnerabilities, and exploit code for them was basically put on the Metasploit website," he said.

"The bottom line is that these systems are not secure; they were not designed to be secure," said Weiss. "Somebody who's knowledgeable can do much more damage than someone who's not knowledgeable, which sounds like a trivial thing. But someone not knowledgeable or who doesn't know what they're doing can still cause problems." Whether or not they're Anonymous.

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