SurvivalBlog presents another edition of The Survivalist’s Odds ‘n Sods— a collection of news bits and pieces that are relevant to the modern survivalist and prepper from “HJL”. Cyber Security is again front and center as we learn of some of the hacks over the last year.
Cyber Security
Wired Magazine has a fascinating article on how three bored college students concocted a scam to give them an advantage in the game of MineCraft. But the software that they wrote, which basically attacked their competitor’s servers, was so effective, it set new records for Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. At its heart, it simply co-opted IoT (Internet of Things) hardware that had not had its default access passwords changed. However, it was so efficient that it was able to infect over 600,000 simultaneous devices at any one time and achieve bandwidth rates of over 1.1 Terabytes. By comparison, the previous known record was about 50 Gigabytes. It managed to take down one of the largest Internet providers in the U.S. last year, leaving much of the east coast with very spotty Internet connectivity.
o o o
Hackers halted Schneider Electric SE plant operations in a cyber attack. SurvivalBlog reader M.P. notes: “While this particular attack seems to have been at a site in the Middle East, the software involved is used widely in the energy industry. The article warns of the likelihood of copy cat attacks elsewhere, but I think it is more likely that others will use this as a stepping stone to even more damaging types of attacks, not just more of the same. A successful attack on some generation parts of the energy grid would be bad. A successful attack on others, such as nuclear plants, could be even more catastrophic, depending on what other actions are part of a particular hack.”
