Sanjay Goel School of Business University at Albany, SUNY

April 12-15, 2010 Garmisch Partenkirchen, Germany

Connecting the Dots in Cyber Intelligence: How Real is the threat to the Critical Infrastructure?

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FOURTH INTERNATIONAL FORUM

SCADA Systems

Infrastructure Risk

• SCADA systems integrated • Recent reports claim US power grid compromised • Possible link between blackouts and terrorists • Smart Grid cause for concern 2

SCADA Systems

Infrastructure Risk

• There has been a relative lack of forthcoming information on the attacks on the critical infrastructure • Probing and attacks continue from several sources (nations and transnational groups) • Attacks on the infrastructure are inevitable • We need to intelligently manage our risks 3

SCADA Systems

Water Supply

• There are 54,064 separate water systems in the U.S. (3,769 serve 81% population; 353 systems serve forty-four percent of the population.

• The disparate control systems makes the job of cyber warriors difficult • At worst the cyber terrorists will be able to disrupt the supply for a short duration in a specific segment • Any toxins would be diluted in the water supply Source: Lewis, James, “Assessing the Risks of Cyber Terrorism, Cyber War and Other Cyber Threats”, Center for Strategic and International Studies, December 2002.

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US Electrical Grid

Highly Interconnected Network

• Highly interdependent • Failures can spread Source: Talbot D., “Lifeline for Renewable Power”, MIT Technology Review, January/February, 2009.

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SCADA Systems

Vulnerabilities in Infrastructure 1:58 pm

Eastlake Ohio plant shuts down

3:06 pm

A First Energy 345-KV transmissi on line fails south of Cleveland Ohio

4:09 pm

Voltage sags as Ohio draws 2GW from Michigan

4:10 pm

Transmission lines start tripping in Michigan and Ohio blocking flow of power East. Due to deficit Generators shut down. Causing blackout in the East

3:17 pm

Voltage dips temporarily on Ohio portion of grid causing power to shift to another transmission line which fails

4:05 pm

Sustained power surge on Ohio lines

3:41& 3:46 pm

2 breakers connecting First Energy’s grid with American Electric Power tripped 6

SCADA Systems

CAL-ISO Hacking Hackers Victimize Cal-ISO

Dan Morain, June 09, 2001 For at least 17 days at the height of the energy crisis

, hackers mounted an attack on a computer system that is integral to the movement of electricity throughout California…

The hackers' success, though apparently limited, brought to light lapses in computer security at the target of the cyber-attack, the California ISO, which oversees most of the state's massive electricity transmission grid.

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Power Grid

Incidents

2009 12 NOV; ONS, Brazil Operador nacional do Sistema Eletrico (ONS) is Brazil's national system operator responsible for controlling the transmission of electricity as well as the operation of generation facilities throughout the nation. On November 12th, a hacker gained access to its corporate network but stopped short of accessing its operational network.

Several prominent intelligence sources confirmed that there were a series of cyber attacks in Brazil: one north of Rio de Janeiro in January 2005 that affected three cities and tens of thousands of people, and another, much larger event beginning on Sept. 26, 2007. The attack in the state of Espirito Santo affected more than three million people in dozens of cities over a two-day period, causing major disruptions. In Vitoria, the world's largest iron ore producer had seven plants knocked offline, costing the company $7 million. It is not clear who did it or what the motive was.

8 Sanjay Goel, School of Business, UAlbany

Smart Grid

Paradigm Shift – Alternate Energy Sources

• U.S. gets only 1% of its electricity from renewable sources compared to 14% for Germany.

• GOAL: 10% by 2012 and 25% by 2025 • Each household will have a smart meter • Allows consumers to both supply and draw power from grid • Two-way power flow • Two-way information flow • Supports conservation Sanjay Goel, School of Business, UAlbany Source: Talbot D., “Lifeline for Renewable Power”, MIT Technology Review, January/February, 2009.

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Smart Grid

Investments

100 Smart Grid projects distributed across 49 states have been funded by federal grants and industry contributions equaling about $8 billion.

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Smart Grid

where are the weaknesses

• Smart Meters can be targeted for malware and other attacks • Homogeneous network of computers highly vulnerable to fast moving viruses and worms • Threats – Connect and disconnect customers from grid – Change metering data and calibration constants – Changing meter's communication frequency.

– Rendering meter non-functional.

Sanjay Goel, School of Business, UAlbany 11

Cyber Intelligence

Internet: An Arena for Terrorists

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Cyber Intelligence

“Looking for a Needle in a Haystack”

• Data-mining works when – Search profile is well-defined – Significant historical data for predictions – Low cost of false alarms • In espionage, counterintelligence, or terrorist plots – Uncertainty of what data to ignore or pay attention to – Attacks often hard to predict (little past data available) – Avenues to hide involvement and communication – False positives could lead to arrest of innocents and lost time on bad leads We failed to stop 9/11 despite having critical intelligence 13

Cyber Intelligence

Anonymity of the Internet

• No specific connection between real identity and internet aliases (can be multiple web identities) • How is this done?

– Anonymous web browsing, e.g. proxy servers – VoIP (e.g. Skype) – Private message boards – Chatrooms / IRC – Use of botnets (to send messages, relay, etc.) – Steganography with website / SPAM images • Need intelligence techniques for assigning attribution (means, motives, and opportunity) 14

Computer Forensics

Tracking Incidents

• Countless ways in which computer can be used to perform illegal activity • Criminals leave behind traces that can be analyzed – Evidence in several media forms, e.g., text, audio, image, video • Multiple sources of data are needed to corroborate 15

Social Network Analysis

Alibaba Dataset

A 12 Member Terrorist Cell -- connected with the Ali Baba Network plans to

“bake a cake”

(build a bomb) which will be targeted to blow up a water treatment facility near London. The plot takes place from April to September of 2003 • A Simulated Signal Intelligence and Human Intelligence – Approximately 800 reports.

– 8 month plot window.

– 409 named entities.

– 98 locations 16 Robert Savell, School of Engineering, Dartmouith

Open Source Data

Proximity of concepts

• We are collecting data from targeted hacker forums/blogs/ websites • Natural Language Processing is being used for analyzing the data • Process used for analyzing data – Develop seed list of relevant concepts in domain of interest and cluster web pages – Develop concept-concept graph for each cluster of documents, and use concept co-occurrence distance and proximity filtering to reduce edge density; – Identify related communities of concept terms within each resulting graph component.

– Manually assess each graph “community” and review the sets of related web pages for information of interest .

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Network Forensics

HoneyNet

• Honeynets are networks of honeypots where all inbound and outbound traffic is collected – Typically runs multiple operating systems & applications – Provides real services that closely match actual conditions in the organization • Any attempt to contact the network from outside is likely an attempt to breach its security • Any outbound activity is likely evidence that a system has been compromised.

• Hacking tools can fingerprint honey pots/nets so they should be camouflaged 18

Network Forensics

DarkNet

• Darknet is a portion of routed, allocated IP space where no active services or servers reside – Consists of a server that gathers packets & flows that enter the Darknet • Blocks contain no active hosts, thus traffic must be caused by mis-configuration, backscatter from spoofed source addresses, or scanning from worms and other probing. • Can be used in conjunction with flow collectors, backscatter detectors, sniffers and/or IDS boxes for further analysis 19

Securing the Internet

Conclusions

• Create security guidelines for utilities to implement • Design resilience in critical infrastructure • Security needs to be built into the infrastructure that we create (Smart Meters) • Assume reasonable risk and smartly allocate resources • Improve ability to detect attacks and respond quickly (data collection and analysis) 20