Malware likely cause of power cut in Ukraine

BlackEnergy malware previously linked to targeted attacks in the country.

When in late December hundreds of thousands of homes in Western Ukraine suffered power outages, many people talked about the possibility of the interruption in power having been caused by a cyber-attack. But people always talk about cyber-attacks — the truth is almost always a lot more mundane.

However, this time things may have been different. ESET's Robert Lipovsky writes that several of the country's energy companies had been targeted by the BlackEnergy trojan around the time of the power cuts, something SCADA expert Robert M. Lee also wrote about, and which the Ukrainian CERT has confirmed to Forbes.

Robert Lipovsky explains how the trojan used the common methods of spear-phishing and malicious Office macros to infect its targets. After infection, BlackEnergy downloaded a second trojan, KillDisk, which appears to be designed to sabotage industrial systems, and which likely caused the outage.

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