The Ukrainian power grid hack that reportedly left 700,000 homes in the dark just before Christmas highlights how the critical infrastructure sectors must step up to the plate and work harder to keep the bad guys out.

It is a safe bet that few industrial control systems (ICS) critical infrastructure organizations would rate their cybersecurity as excellent. If they know this, the hackers do too and that makes them an easy target. In the Ukrainian instance, the payload was delivered via spear phishing exploits and then looked for a certain running process common to SCADA systems. When it found it, it killed the process and overwrote it, effectively making the device useless.

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