Together, in other words, the groups Dragos call Kamacite and Electrum make up what other researchers and government agencies collectively call Sandworm. “One group gets in, the other group knows what to do when they get in,” says Caltagirone. “And when they operate separately, which we also watch them do, we clearly see that neither is very good at the other’s job.”
When WIRED reached out to other threat-intelligence firms including FireEye and CrowdStrike, none could confirm seeing a Sandworm-related intrusion campaign targeting US utilities as reported by Dragos. But FireEye has previously confirmed seeing a widespread US-targeted intrusion campaign tied to another GRU group known as APT28 or Fancy Bear, which WIRED revealed last year after obtaining an FBI notification email sent to targets of that campaign. Dragos pointed out at the time that the APT28 campaign shared command-and-control infrastructure with another intrusion attempt that had targeted a US “energy entity” in 2019, according to an advisory from the US Department of Energy. Given that APT28 and Sandworm have worked hand-in-hand in the past, Dragos now pins that 2019 energy-sector targeting on Kamacite as part of its larger multiyear US-targeted hacking spree.
Dragos’ report goes on to name two other new groups targeting US industrial control systems. The first, which it calls Vanadinite, appears to be have connections to the broad group of Chinese hackers known as Winnti. Dragos blames Vanadinite for attacks that used the ransomware known as ColdLock to disrupt Taiwanese victim organizations, including state-owned energy firms. But it also points to Vanadinite targeting energy, manufacturing, and transportation targets around the world, including in Europe, North America, and Australia, in some cases by exploiting vulnerabilities in VPNs.
The second newly named group, which Dragos calls Talonite, appears to have targeted North American electric utilities, too, using malware-laced spear phishing emails. It has no clear connections to previously known hacker groups. Yet another group Dragos has dubbed Stibnite has targeted Azerbaijani electric utilities and wind farms using phishing websites and malicious email attachments, but has not hit the US to the security firm’s knowledge.
While none among the ever-growing list of hacker groups targeting industrial control systems around the world appears to have used those control systems to trigger actual disruptive effects in 2020, Dragos warns that the sheer number of those groups represents a disturbing trend. Caltagirone points to a rare but relatively crude intrusion targeting a small water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida earlier this month, in which a still-unidentified hacker attempted to vastly increase the levels of caustic lye in the 15,000-person city’s water. Given the lack of protections on those sorts of small infrastructure targets, a group like Kamacite, Caltagirone argues, could easily trigger widespread, harmful effects even without the industrial-control system expertise of a partner group like Electrum.
That means the rise in even relatively unskilled groups poses a real threat, Caltagirone says. The number of groups targeting industrial control systems has been continually growing, he adds, ever since Stuxnet showed at the beginning of the last decade that industrial hacking with physical effects is possible. “A lot of groups are appearing, and there are not a lot going away,” says Caltagirone. “In three to four years, I feel like we’re going to reach a peak, and it will be an absolute catastrophe.”
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