Crippled ports. Paralyzed corporations. Frozen government agencies. How a single piece of code crashed the world.
From a linked article: No one knew much about the group’s intentions. But all signs indicated that the hackers were Russian: FireEye had traced one of Sandworm’s distinctive intrusion techniques to a presentation at a Russian hacker conference. And when FireEye’s engineers managed to access one of Sandworm’s unsecured command-and-control servers, they found instructions for how to use BlackEnergy written in Russian, along with other Russian-language files. For some reason I find this single tidbit, that the Russians responsible for these attacks are (probably) into Dune, incredibly humanizing. I'm not entirely sure what to do with that.In 2014 the security firm FireEye had issued warnings about a team of hackers that was planting BlackEnergy malware on targets that included Polish energy firms and Ukrainian government agencies; the group seemed to be developing methods to target the specialized computer architectures that are used for remotely managing physical industrial equipment. The group’s name came from references to Dune found buried in its code, terms like Harkonnen and Arrakis, an arid planet in the novel where massive sandworms roam the deserts.
That right there hit me viscerally... "...When Derevianko emerged from the restaurant in the early evening, he stopped to refuel his car and found that the gas station’s credit card payment system had been taken out by NotPetya too. With no cash in his pockets, he eyed his gas gauge, wondering if he had enough fuel to reach his village. Across the country, Ukrainians were asking themselves similar questions: whether they had enough money for groceries and gas to last through the blitz, whether they would receive their paychecks and pensions, whether their prescriptions would be filled..."