The New York Times has published new details about an alleged cyberattack that unnamed US officials claim was aimed at plunging parts of Venezuela into darkness in a bid to capture the country’s President Nicolas Maduro.
Key among the new details is that the cyber operation was able to cut off power to most residents of the capital, Caracas, for only a few minutes, although in some neighborhoods close to the military base where Maduro was captured, power outages lasted up to three days. The cyber-op also targeted Venezuelan military radar defenses. The newspaper said that the US Cyber Command was involved.
Got more information?
The NYT reported, “Shutting off power in Caracas and interfering with radar allowed U.S. military helicopters to enter the country unannounced on their mission to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who has now been extradited to the United States to face drug charges.”
The NYT provided some additional details. The methods allegedly used were discarded. For example, when Russia seized power in December 2015, it used general-purpose malware called BlackEnergy to first infiltrate the corporate networks of targeted power companies and then infiltrate the supervisory control and data acquisition systems that the companies used to generate and transmit power. The Russian attackers then used legitimate power distribution functionality to trigger a failure, knocking out power to more than 225,000 people for more than six hours, when grid personnel restored it.
In a second attack almost exactly a year later, Russia used a more sophisticated piece of malware to take out key parts of the Ukrainian power grid. Named Industriale and alternatively Crash Override, it is the first known malware framework designed to directly attack the electric grid system.
<a href