The indictments unsealed today by the Justice Department confirm that Russian hackers have been targeting the safety systems of a US company that owns multiple oil refineries.
hackers behind the malware known as Triton or Trisis have stood out as a uniquely dangerous threat to critical infrastructure: a group of digital intruders who attempted to sabotage industrial safety systems, with physical, potentially catastrophic results. Now the US Department of Justice has put a name to one of the hackers in that group—and confirmed that their targets included a US company that owns multiple oil refineries.
The second indictment, filed in June 2021, levels charges against a member of an arguably more dangerous team of hackers: a Russian group known variously as the Triton or Trisis actor, Xenotime or Temp.Veles.
"Now we have confirmation from the government," says Joe Slowik, a researcher at security firm Gigamon who analyzed the Triton malware when it first appeared and has tracked the hackers behind it for years. "We have an entity that was playing around with a safety-instrumented system in a high-risk environment. And to try to do that not just in Saudi Arabia, but in the United States, is concerning.
The next month, prosecutors say, Gladkikh began searching for job postings that might reveal which industrial control system software was used at a specific US company that owned multiple refineries named in those government reports.
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