Review of major safety incidents in industrial control systems

The Stuxnet virus attacked Iran’s nuclear power plant, causing the failure of uranium enrichment facilities

Iran

In June 2010, the failure of uranium enrichment equipment at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant delayed Iran’s nuclear program. After investigation, it was due to the attack of a new worm virus, the virus code appeared the signature word “stux”, and Stuxnet was also named Stuxnet virus. Stuxnet is believed to be the first malicious code to specifically target infrastructure (energy) in the real world.

Ukraine’s power grid has been attacked, causing widespread blackouts

Ukraine

On 23 December 2015, nearly half of the households in the Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk (about 1.4 million people) experienced power outages for several hours. After investigation, the incident was caused by the Trojan malware attack, due to its wide range of impact, prompting the security of industrial control systems to be more widely concerned.

The WannaCry ransomware virus has hit the world

global

On May 12, 2017, WannaCry ransomware used the MS17-010 vulnerability to attack the world, at least 150 countries, 300,000 users, causing losses of $8 billion, has affected many industries such as finance, energy, healthcare. Some ordinary users and enterprises and institutions in China were infected, resulting in a large number of files being encrypted and unable to work normally, which had a huge impact.

TSMC’s three major factories have been infected by the virus, resulting in a large-scale production line shutdown

Taiwan

On August 3, 2018, some of TSMC’s production equipment was infected by the virus one after another, resulting in the shutdown of some factories in its three major production bases in Taiwan. TSMC, as the world’s largest chip foundry, has always been a target of hackers and suffers a large number of cyber attacks every year. But this is the first time such a large-scale production line shutdown has occurred.

A power outage in Venezuela led to a massive blackout that lasted six days

Venezuela

On March 7, 2019, a massive power outage occurred across Venezuela, affecting 18 out of 23 states. As of the end of April 2019, the cause of this incident is not yet clear.