Recently, Dragos, a industrial cybersecurity solutions and research film unveiled and brought to light an ingenious campaign that aimed at hacking computers of engineers. This campaign aimed to slip malware into computers of engineers and operators working in industries. The target list of this campaign included leading global brands manufacturing industrial controllers.
The firm discovered this when an employee with an engineer reached out to them. Dragos reverse engineered the campaign and made the results of its research public earlier this month.
The threat creators executed the campaign under the guise of selling software that cracks passwords to Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC). These are high tech devices used in industrial machines for automated performance.
Dragos asserted that the engineer who approached them used a password cracker by downloading in on a computer and connecting the computer to the PLC. The computer started to malfunction after the password was recovered.
The engineer requested Dragos to reverse engineer the password cracking software and determined it did not crack the password at al. The software rather developed the Sality malware and turned the host into a peer in Sality’s peer-to-peer botnet.
Sality, a potent malware, can steal all passwords from the target computer. In addition, it is capable of detecting anti-virus software and disabling it, leaving it vulnerable for attacks.
