Hackers have actually broken into the Brazilian Power Grid

About a week ago 60 Minutes covered a story about hackers breaking into the Brazilian power grid and causing power outages through out the country.  The common believe is that this story wasn’t actually correct.  However hackers appear to have liked the idea, and have done what was originally claimed in the story.

Google has a translation of the article, and the original can be found here.

The power company is question claims that the blackout which hit 18 Brazilian states on Tuesday was not caused by the hackers.  However the timing out the attack and the outage is very suspicious.  This just goes to show that utilities needs to take even more care that other companies to secure there environments to ensure that the services which they provide remain online as peoples live depend on the power staying on.

Based on the results of testing against the sites as reported by Darkreading the standard SQL Injection attack may have been used in this case to attack the site and break in.  One would think that a company as large as a countries power company would be able to have developers which wouldn’t allow SQL Injection attacks.

Denny