The New York Times has published new details about a purported cyber attack unnamed US officials claim plunged parts of Venezuela into darkness in the lead-up to the capture of the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro.
Key among the new details is that the cyber operation was able to turn off electricity for most residents in the capital city of Caracas for only a few minutes, though in some neighborhoods close to the military base where Maduro was seized, the outage lasted for three days. The cyber-op also targeted Venezuelan military radar defenses. The paper said the US Cyber Command was involved.
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“Turning off the power in Caracas and interfering with radar allowed US military helicopters to move into the country undetected on their mission to capture Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president who has now been brought to the United States to face drug charges,” the NYT reported.
The NYT provided few additional details. Left out were the methods purportedly used. When Russia took out electricity in December 2015, for instance, it used general-purpose malware known as BlackEnergy to first penetrate the corporate networks of the targeted power companies and then further encroach into the supervisory control and data acquisition systems the companies used to generate and transmit electricity. The Russian attackers then used legitimate power distribution functionality to trigger the failure, which took out power to more than 225,000 people for more than six hours, after grid workers restored it.
In a second attack almost exactly a year later, Russia used a much more sophisticated piece of malware to take out key parts of the Ukrainian power grid. Named Industroyer and alternatively Crash Override, it’s the first known malware framework designed to attack electric grid systems directly.