No time to do a full analysis but the basics are a story out of Israel of a tunnel that was hit by a sophisticated cyber attack that caused a… traffic jam. The story went out on the Associated Press newswire on a Sunday afternoon so by Monday morning it was pretty much everywhere you looked.
The “attack” was supposedly a “classified matter” involving “a Trojan horse attack” that targeted the security camera system in the Carmel Tunnels toll road on Sept. 8. The attack caused an immediate 20-minute lockdown of the roadway and then an eight hour shutdown the next day causing a pretty big traffic jam. Supposedly the attack was the work of “unknown, sophisticated hackers” which were then compared to Anonymous but not sophisticated enough to be nation state funded attackers from Iran.
Even just by reading this it sounds like a run of the mill malware infestation and not some targeted sophisticated state sponsored cyber attack. I mean why would anyone specifically target a tunnel? There is no money there, no intellectual property to be stolen, so unless your goal is to create an isolated traffic jam, whats the point? But there is more. The tunnel operators, CarmelTun, issued a statement saying Nope, no cyber attack here. And blamed the traffic jam on a “an internal component malfunction” and went on to say “this was not a hacker attack.”
@snd_wagenseil @4Dgifts @WeldPond more than one source confirmed.
— Daniel Estrin (@DanielEstrin) October 28, 2013
According to @DanielEstrin whose name is on the byline of the story, more than one source confirmed this Trojan Horse attack story and yet he did not bother to confirm with the people most likely to know, the actual operators of the tunnel.
So we can either believe the unnamed “cybersecurity experts” who warned of a sophisticated “Trojan horse attack” that was compared to Anonymous and was conducted for no monetary gain or intelectual property theft or we can believe the operators of the actual tunnel system itself. Who has more to gain here?
Late Update:
Looks like I am not the only one to think this might not have been a cyber attack.
“Cyberattack Against Israeli Highway System? Maybe Not”