An increasing number of threat groups have been spotted targeting electric utilities in North America, industrial cybersecurity firm Dragos reported on Thursday.
The company has published a new report that describes the threats faced by the electric sector in North America.
“As adversaries and their sponsors invest more effort and money into obtaining effects-focused capabilities, the risk of a disruptive or destructive attack on the electric sector significantly increases,” the firm said in its report, titled North American Electric Cyber Threat Perspective.
Dragos currently tracks a total of 11 threat groups that have been known to target industrial control systems (ICS), and seven of them have attacked electric utilities in North America. It tracks these groups as PARISITE, XENOTIME, MAGNALLIUM, DYMALLOY, RASPITE, ALLANITE and COVELLITE.
The company last year reported that XENOTIME, the threat actor behind the 2017 Triton/Trisis malware attack on a Saudi Arabian petrochemical plant, had started targeting electric utilities in the United States and the APAC region.
In its new report, Dragos has revealed that MAGNALLIUM also started targeting electric utilities in the U.S., in the fall of 2019. MAGNALLIUM, which other companies track as APT33 and Elfin, has been active since at least 2013. The hackers, which some experts have linked to Iran, initially targeted companies in Saudi Arabia, but later expanded their operations to Europe and North America.
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Dragos’ new report also reveals the existence of PARISITE, a MAGNAL ..
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