WASHINGTON DC – Hackers working for Russia were able to gain access to the control rooms of US electric utilities last year, allowing them to cause blackouts, federal officials tell the Wall Street Journal.
The hackers — working for a state-sponsored group previously identified as Dragonfly or Energetic Bear — broke into utilities’ isolated networks by hacking networks belonging to third-party vendors that had relationships with the power companies, the Department of Homeland Security said in a press briefing on Monday.
Officials said the campaign had claimed “hundreds of victims” and is likely continuing, the Journal reported.
“They got to the point where they could have thrown switches” to disrupt the flow power, Jonathan Homer, chief of industrial-control-system analysis for DHS, told the Journal.
“While hundreds of energy and non-energy companies were targeted, the incident where they gained access to the industrial control system was a very small generation asset that would not have had any impact on the larger grid if taken offline,” the DHS said in a statement Tuesday. “Over the course of the past year as we continued to investigate the activity, we learned additional information which would be helpful to industry in defending against this threat.”
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