Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Poland's energy grid was targeted by never-before-seen wiper malware

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–158 of 158 posts

Re: Poland's energy grid was targeted by never-before-seen wiper malware

#151

Post by Throaway1982 »

exoverito wrote: post #147
reactordev wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the information war they have been waging globally since 2016

The US, UK, and Western powers have been waging information war for far longer than 2016. Look at Canadian PM Mark Carney's latest speech at Davos, he admits the 'Rules based international order' was a fiction, and the US has had a very long history of covert operations, 'enhanced interrogation', destabilization campaigns, funding of terrorists, propping up of dictators, bombing and invading of many countries... To b…

Unfortunately its also entirely rational for Ukraine to want to join an alliance against Russia!

Re: Poland's energy grid was targeted by never-before-seen wiper malware

#152

Post by weezing »

rasz wrote: post #140
wtcactus wrote: post #81

Will this be the time that EU grows a spine and comes together to oppose Russia? Naaa, better continue to have Germany and France continue to destroy the Union by looking only at their self interests while they pretend to talk tough on Trump and sabotage any real internal changes so that they can keep their crumbs. Just this week, France’s meddling halted a deal that was 30 years in the making: Mercosul while their p…

>France’s meddling halted a deal that was 30 years in the making: Mercosul Mercosur would actually be Polish complaint to the EU Court of Justice (CJEU) https://www.visahq.com/news/2026-01-22/pl/polish-meps-spearh...

Poland as usual doing God's work.

Re: Poland's energy grid was targeted by never-before-seen wiper malware

#153

Post by redeeman »

nawgz wrote: post #143
redeeman wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

okay, so you think just attaching PLCs to an rs485-to-ethernet adapter and connecting it straight unauthenticated to the internet, and then calling it a day is simply perfectly reasonable, since "well.. cant expect to harden against cyber warfare!! no defect!!!" ? because this is the kind of stuff infrastructure things do, along with MANY other things. Im sure not all infrastructure does it, but plenty do. This is no…

Well, your unsourced assertions sound dramatically incompetent, but the linked article says the Russian cyberattack on Ukraine in 2015 was the first malware caused blackout, and the titular event of the article failed to cause harm, which kind of paints a different picture. I’ll therefore decline to comment on your assertions. I will acknowledge it’s time to consider Russian interference as expected if you are design…

depends on what you mean by fatally compromise, much infrastructure across europe, and I would strongly think the US aswell(allthough here I am only familiar with 1 example), it is absolutely trivial to atleast temporarily disable and possibly bring some harm for anyone unauthenticatedly.

I am not saying whether russians are doing it or not, im just saying that its not just victim blaming, and that anyone operating with this level of security is grossly negligant and should be severely punished as criminals

Re: Poland's energy grid was targeted by never-before-seen wiper malware

#154

Post by K0balt »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #39
K0balt wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give some examples of? I can imagine that under the right circumstances you might succeed in blowing up some transformers or even a turbine, but it seems like you’d be up to speed within a month or two on the outside? Or am I missing the gravity somehow?

Pardon? A month or two without power does not seem like an enormous crisis? Stuxnet destroyed centrifuges. It does not seem impossible that a sophisticated attack could shred some critical equipment. During the Texas 2021 outage -they were incredibly close to losing the entire grid and being in a blackstart scenario. Estimates were that it could take weeks to bring back power - all this without any physical equipment…

A month or two of isolated outages should not be a crisis in a developed nation with resources and infrastructure.

The fact that the Texas outages killed anyone is a testament to the fact that the USA is, apparently, a developing nation, possibly going through a rough patch.

It’s not like there wasn’t enough generators or fuel in the nation to ameliorate that crisis. It was that, like all developing nations, resources are not available at the point of need despite their widespread availability.

Re: Poland's energy grid was targeted by never-before-seen wiper malware

#155

Post by cyanydeez »

bethekidyouwant wrote: post #148
cyanydeez wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have two clear videos of federal USA employees executing citizens. What stopa the execution of legal system? The claim that we cant know 100% of the facts. In reality, theres little to dispute with the facts. Theres simply groups of true believers and those who think we need more clarity. Those two forces alloq the continuation of violations

I thought you were talking about Russian hacking

I am. Why arn't we doing more against "Russian" hacking, because:

1. They outsource it

2. It rarely has clear red flags, eg "Putin's IP showed up on our PC before the virus"

So, I'm generalizing the argument about why direct action rarely occurs: It's because even if theres a great deal of evidence, the fuzzy logic required to say "this is statistically true" is rarely used.

Re: Poland's energy grid was targeted by never-before-seen wiper malware

#156

Post by theshrike79 »

yesturi wrote: post #103
postepowanieadm wrote: post #80

Poland has a high alertness status for like 5 years now. So there was time to be prepared.

There's some news about some psy-op or some damage every couple of days. We hear about "Russian trolls" and influencing the political discourse. I wonder if there is any symmetrical response to this happening. How about unleashing psy-ops and "Western trolls" in Runet? Is Europe in purely defensive mode?

It's the openness needed in western societies.

The lack of political will to create and fund covert offensive operations over the internet.

Russia has had this down for _years_, it's not illegal to hack non-Russian targets, so people do it. They have command and control systems where they can give out tasks like "find me vulnerabilities for Siemens XYZ hardware" and then a team will pick that up and do it.

They also practice infiltration, exfiltration and coordination with their attacks. Every kiddie can get in with maximum noise, the truly skilled ones get OUT without leaving any definite traces.

And I'm not talking out of my ass: https://youtu.be/jbIR7YVAYnc - I'm talking out of Marina Krotofil's ass, she's been investigating and dissecting this for a long time.

Re: Poland's energy grid was targeted by never-before-seen wiper malware

#157

Post by theshrike79 »

canada_dry wrote: post #62

Assuming that Ukraine cyber attacks (novel/0-day) on the Russian energy grid must be happening, I don't often hear of this happening there. Why not?? Is Russia's grid infrastructure so old as to not be as vulnerable?

There is no war in Ba Sing Se

Since the start of the war, Russia will rather admit incompetence (a soldier was smoking next to an ammo depot) than admit Ukraine succeeded in a military objective.

Re: Poland's energy grid was targeted by never-before-seen wiper malware

#158

Post by theshrike79 »

HPsquared wrote: post #2

For what purpose? Cui bono?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_generation_warfare

It's the Russian doctrine

Keep the population of hostile countries uneasy at all times, destabilise a bit here and there, help them argue about stupid identity politics instead of focusing on things that actually matter.

When people become complacent about Russians poking around here and there, breaking in and not doing anything etc - then when they actually need to act, the defence will be lukewarm.

Post reply on HN