Over the weekend Wikipedia sustained a cyberattack that took it offline in several countries. Computing calls the outage the result of a large distributed denial-of-service attack affecting Europe and the Middle East. The Wikimedia Foundation said Saturday that “'bad faith' actors" of the sort it tends to attract were responsible. Wikipedia's working to restore normal operations.
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC, an industry group) has released a report on the 5 March 2019 incident that affected the US power grid. According to E&E News, this cyberattack generated the first formal report of a "cyber incident" from the utilities to the Department of Energy. NERC's report of lessons learned downplays the severity of the attack as affecting a "low-impact control center," and it cites a basic lapse in cyber hygiene (failure to patch a firewall) as the enabling cause. (Control Global harrumphs in NERC's direction that there've been plenty of others.) Coincidentally or not, the Wall Street Journal observes that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC, a US Government regulatory body) is considering revising its rules to include public identification of electric utilities that fail to follow rules designed to ensure the grid's physical and cyber security.
CyberScoop reports that Symantec thinks a recently discovered Chinese government hacking group, "Thrip," may actually be another manifestation of the long-active "Billbug" (or "LotusBlossom") unit.
Axios speculates that US Cyber Command is trolling Pyongyang by releasing samples of DPRK malware on September 9th, North Korea's Day of the Foundation of the Republic.
