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Yesterday — 28 October 2026Main stream

As US ties fray, Europe plans first undersea cable link to Greenland

28 October 2026 at 18:35

The European Union plans to create the first subsea Internet cable directly connecting Europe to Greenland. The Pan-Arctic Cable project could also extend to Canada and eventually link with Japan and South Korea, notably bypassing the United States.

The Pan-Arctic Cable is described as a European Union flagship project in a European Commission joint communication published on October 20, 2026. The policy document describes a new European strategy for the Arctic that supports “a sovereign, secure and resilient submarine cable connection linking Greenland directly to the EU,” while also suggesting that “like-minded partners like Canada” could provide a stepping stone for future cable expansion toward Asia.

“It is interesting that this project is even being considered, because five years ago it would have seemed like not a particularly commercially attractive proposition,” Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who leads the Threats to the Global Maritime Order Initiative, told Ars. “But the fact that it's being considered is very much on trend and a sign of our times.”

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© Mads Claus Rasmussen / Ritzau Scanpix / AFP via Getty Images) / Denmark OUT

Ukraine plans to spend 43.8% of its GDP on defense in 2027

28 October 2026 at 08:57
Ukraine’s parliament has approved in a first reading a 2027 state budget that sets aside 4.885 trillion hryvnias (about $107.5 billion) for security and defense, equal to 43.8% of the country’s projected gross domestic product. The Verkhovna Rada passed draft budget No. 16000 on Oct. 28 with 239 votes in favor, 25 against and 26 […]

Canada’s CH-148 Cyclone fleet gets radar warning software fix

28 October 2026 at 03:55
Lockheed Martin will update the radar warning and electronic support software on Canada’s CH-148 Cyclone maritime helicopters under a $9.8 million contract awarded through the U.S. Navy, with work running until October 2030. Naval Air Systems Command placed the contract with Lockheed’s Owego, New York, operation on behalf of the Canadian government, which is paying […]
Before yesterdayMain stream

Canada gets its first two CF-35A stealth fighters

24 October 2026 at 03:13
The Royal Canadian Air Force has taken delivery of its first two CF-35A stealth fighters, the Canadian version of the Lockheed Martin F-35A Lightning II, at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, the service announced. The jets will stay at Luke, a major U.S. Air Force training base for F-35 pilots from the United States […]

Cardano Puts Real-World Usage At The Centre Of New Catalyst Grants

20 October 2026 at 08:25

TL;DR: Cardano is highlighting a 12-team Catalyst pilot in which much of the grant funding depends on real adoption rather than merely launching a project.

Crypto grant programmes have a familiar problem: it’s easier to count funded ideas than products anyone actually uses. Cardano’s Project Catalyst has been trying a different approach with its 2026 pilot cohort, which is now being highlighted again by the ecosystem.

The original selection announcement came on September 24. Twelve teams were chosen from 117 applications, covering areas including stablecoin payments, lending, programmable tokens, identity and supply-chain applications. The pool was designed around roughly two million ADA in grant funding.

The more interesting detail is how teams get paid. Catalyst says 40% of an approved grant is released after onboarding, while the rest is linked to adoption targets and continued use. That asks recipients to demonstrate something after deployment, rather than treating a completed build as the final measure of success.

The programme also involved 52 active community curators, with specialist reviewers examining the business and technical case for applications.

None of that proves that the selected projects will succeed. There is a difference between promising measurable use and demonstrating it on-chain, and the pilot will ultimately be judged on the latter.

Still, the funding model gives Cardano a concrete experiment to watch: can distributing ADA on the basis of usage deliver better outcomes than the traditional grant cycle?

Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.

Ukraine-proven Senator joins Canada’s capital police

21 October 2026 at 05:50
The Ottawa Police Service’s tactical unit has added a Roshel Senator armored vehicle fitted with a hydraulic assault ramp that can lift officers to second-floor windows and rooftops in seconds, giving Canada’s capital the same Canadian-built armored vehicle that Ukraine has used in large numbers on the battlefield. U.S. manufacturer Patriot3 announced that its LIBERATOR […]

UAE-made armored vehicles seen again in Russia

21 October 2026 at 02:39
Armored vehicles built by Emirati manufacturer Streit Group have been spotted again in Russian service, this time with Gyurza, the special rapid response unit (SOBR) of Rosgvardia’s Main Directorate for the Moscow region, which was photographed operating a Cobra-LAMV 4×4. The light armored vehicle is built on a Toyota Land Cruiser chassis and marketed by […]

Cardano Puts Real-World Usage At The Centre Of New Catalyst Grants

20 October 2026 at 08:25

TL;DR: Cardano is highlighting a 12-team Catalyst pilot in which much of the grant funding depends on real adoption rather than merely launching a project.

Crypto grant programmes have a familiar problem: it’s easier to count funded ideas than products anyone actually uses. Cardano’s Project Catalyst has been trying a different approach with its 2026 pilot cohort, which is now being highlighted again by the ecosystem.

The original selection announcement came on September 24. Twelve teams were chosen from 117 applications, covering areas including stablecoin payments, lending, programmable tokens, identity and supply-chain applications. The pool was designed around roughly two million ADA in grant funding.

The more interesting detail is how teams get paid. Catalyst says 40% of an approved grant is released after onboarding, while the rest is linked to adoption targets and continued use. That asks recipients to demonstrate something after deployment, rather than treating a completed build as the final measure of success.

The programme also involved 52 active community curators, with specialist reviewers examining the business and technical case for applications.

None of that proves that the selected projects will succeed. There is a difference between promising measurable use and demonstrating it on-chain, and the pilot will ultimately be judged on the latter.

Still, the funding model gives Cardano a concrete experiment to watch: can distributing ADA on the basis of usage deliver better outcomes than the traditional grant cycle?

Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.

Military turns HAARP into a radar to watch Alaska’s skies

20 October 2026 at 05:35
The U.S. military has used HAARP, the giant research antenna field in Alaska long at the center of conspiracy theories, as the transmitter for an experimental radar that detected aircraft beyond the horizon by bouncing signals off the upper atmosphere. Military personnel, scientists and international partners carried out the live-fly test from Sept. 7 to […]

Cardano Stablecoin Market Tops $70 Million As USDC Dominates Supply

18 October 2026 at 16:30

TL;DR: Stablecoins issued or circulating on Cardano reached roughly $70.2 million in DefiLlama’s October 18 snapshot, up about 31% over 30 days. USDC represents nearly two-thirds of that total.

Cardano’s stablecoin market has crossed another small but notable threshold. DefiLlama’s October 18 figures put the network’s dollar-pegged token supply at approximately $70.2 million, with 30-day growth of about 31%.

USDC accounts for most of the balance. The tracker lists around $44.5 million in USD Coin on Cardano, equivalent to roughly 63.5% of all stablecoins it follows there. Moneta’s USDM contributes about $13.5 million, while RealFi USDrf and Anzens USDA make up smaller portions of the total.

For an ecosystem seeking deeper decentralized finance markets, stablecoin supply is an important ingredient. Traders and lenders need liquid assets that can serve as a common dollar unit, and developers often rely on them to support borrowing, payments and settlement.

But supply is not the same thing as usage. An increase in circulating stablecoins does not prove that the same value is trading regularly, that lending applications are earning more revenue, or that demand for ADA is rising. Those are separate questions requiring transaction and protocol data.

The change also comes from a relatively modest base compared with the stablecoin markets on Ethereum and other larger networks. Percentages can look dramatic when the starting number is small.

Still, the growth gives Cardano applications more dollar-denominated liquidity to work with. The next milestone will be demonstrating that additional balances are being used productively rather than simply parked on-chain.

Canada’s Calian wins $33M deal to script NATO war games

17 October 2026 at 03:31
Canadian defense contractor Calian Group has won a five-year contract worth about CA$47 million ($33.2 million) to keep writing the scenarios behind NATO’s major command exercises at the alliance’s Joint Warfare Centre in Stavanger, Norway. The Ottawa-based company said it won the contract after a competitive procurement and will continue an existing role as a […]

LinkedIn just released its list of the top 10 Seattle startups: One problem, nearly half aren’t based in the region

By: John Cook
14 October 2026 at 17:42
Image via LinkedIn

Every so often, we get sucked into a list touting the top regional startups or the most robust entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Well, a startup list released today from Microsoft-owned LinkedIn — titled “The 10 companies on the rise in Seattle” — grabbed our attention, for all of the wrong reasons.

Let’s just say: We know a thing or two about Seattle-area startups around here. And so we had to do a little fact-checking.

First of all, four of the companies on LinkedIn’s list — Anthropic, Auger, Whatnot and Armada — are not even headquartered in the Seattle area.

San Francisco-based Anthropic — ranked #1 on LinkedIn’s Seattle startup list — has a growing engineering center at Dexter Yard North in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood. But to think that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and his team are cutting deals at the Washington Athletic Club or debating the future of AI over lattes in Kirkland is a hallucination bigger than most AI models could create.

If the LinkedIn team were studying GeekWire’s coverage, they’d also realize that #2 on their list, Auger, is not headquartered in the Seattle area, either. The AI logistics startup, co-founded by former Amazon executive Dave Clark, moved its headquarters to Dallas in August, although it maintains a Bellevue engineering center.

It keeps getting more bizarre from there. The #3 company on LinkedIn’s Seattle list is Whatnot, the heavily funded video-based shopping startup that set up an engineering center in Seattle last year, but is clearly headquartered in the Los Angeles area.

Finally, ranked #9 on the Seattle list is data center upstart Armada — a company that, according to its own LinkedIn profile, is based in San Francisco.

So, just to summarize: Three of the top Seattle startups (according to LinkedIn) have their headquarters in California, and one has its headquarters in Texas.

GeekWire columnist and angel investor Charles Fitzgerald pointed out the flaws in the list, calling it a “half-assed” effort. “For a Microsoft-owned company, you’d think they’d have better insight into where Seattle is actually located,” Fitzgerald said.

The list does include some companies that are actually based in the Seattle area.

Making the top 10 are: Bellevue-based Truveta (#4); Seattle-based Yoodli (#5); Redmond-based Worldscape (#6); Seattle-based Overland AI (#7); Seattle-based Gradial (#8); and Kent-based Stoke Space (#10).

All of those companies (except for Worldscape) are listed on the GeekWire 200, our ranking of the top 200 privately held startup companies in the Pacific Northwest. The other companies — Anthropic, Auger, Whatnot and Armada — are listed on our engineering center list.

Notably absent from LinkedIn’s Seattle list is Chainguard, which ranked #42 on LinkedIn’s accompanying report on the top 50 startups in the U.S. Chainguard is headquartered in Kirkland but is a fully remote company. The Seattle ranking counts only employees and hiring in the city, which may explain why a remote company like Chainguard didn’t make the cut.

For our purposes, given that one of the co-founders of the cybersecurity startup calls the Seattle area home, we claim it as a Seattle-area startup.

In its defense, LinkedIn describes a Seattle startup a bit differently than we do here at GeekWire.

According to its methodology, the ranking weighs four factors: employment growth, engagement with company pages, interest in job openings, and the ability to recruit talent from LinkedIn’s list of top companies. The data covers July 2025 through June 2026.

LinkedIn requires privately-held companies to be less than seven years old and headquartered in the United States to qualify for its U.S. rankings, but doesn’t require them to be headquartered in the Seattle area to make the Seattle list. All of which explains how a startup can make a list of Seattle’s top startups without actually being based in Seattle.

We have to admit, this is a new one on us.

As GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop notes: What the heck is going on, LinkedIn?

UPDATE: LinkedIn provided this statement to GeekWire:

“While companies do not need to be headquartered in Seattle to qualify, they must have at least 30 full-time employees based in the metro area. Our city lists are designed to spotlight startups gaining momentum, locally, recognizing that growing companies often have employees and operations across multiple markets. Further, the data for the city lists are reflecting employees based in that city only, versus the entire country.”

Refrigeration Controller Hack Spoils Food Across European Supermarkets

13 October 2026 at 04:28

A cyberattack targeted refrigeration controllers, setting refrigerators and freezers across hundreds of supermarkets to defrost.

The post Refrigeration Controller Hack Spoils Food Across European Supermarkets appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Canadian-Dollar Stablecoin CADD Goes Live On Solana

25 September 2026 at 10:30

TL;DR

  • Tetra Digital Group has expanded its Canadian-dollar stablecoin CADD onto Solana.
  • CADD is designed to maintain a 1:1 relationship with Canadian dollars held as reserves.
  • The September 23 rollout is a Solana expansion; CADD had already launched on other blockchain networks earlier in 2026.

Canada’s regulated stablecoin market now has a new Solana connection.

Tetra Digital Group has deployed CADD, its Canadian-dollar stablecoin, on the network, giving applications another way to settle and transfer CAD-denominated value onchain.

CADD Brings Canadian Dollars Into A Dollar-Dominated Market

Most stablecoin activity revolves around the U.S. dollar.

USDT and USDC dominate onchain liquidity, payments and crypto trading, leaving users dealing in other currencies to convert through dollar-denominated assets.

CADD is designed to offer a Canadian-dollar alternative.

Tetra says each token is backed on a 1:1 basis by Canadian-dollar reserves and can be used for payments, transfers, treasury operations and settlement.

The company describes CADD as the first Canadian-dollar stablecoin issued by a regulated financial institution.

Solana becomes another distribution network for the token alongside CADD’s earlier deployments on Ethereum, Base and Tempo.

That is the key framing: September 23 marks the Solana rollout, not the original creation of CADD.

Regulated Stablecoins Still Need Clear Token Verification

Shortly after the Solana launch, Tetra warned users that copycat CADD tokens were appearing on the permissionless network and published the official mint address.

That is a practical problem whenever a regulated asset moves onto a public blockchain.

Anyone can create a token with a familiar ticker.

The name alone does not prove it represents a claim on the issuer’s reserves.

For applications integrating CADD, verifying the official mint therefore becomes as important as checking the issuer behind the asset.

Solana gives Tetra access to low-cost, high-throughput settlement and an active stablecoin ecosystem.

Whether users actually want significant CAD-denominated onchain liquidity remains the bigger question.

Canada has traditionally been a smaller crypto market than the United States, but having a regulated local-currency token creates infrastructure that payment companies and financial applications can build around.

CADD does not need to compete with USDT globally to matter.

It needs to make moving Canadian dollars onchain useful enough that businesses stop automatically routing everything through U.S. dollar stablecoins first.

This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.

Cardano Governance Approves New Treasury Funding Allocations

24 September 2026 at 18:30

TL;DR

  • Cardano’s governance process has approved new treasury allocations for ecosystem and infrastructure work in the supplied September 22 governance update.
  • The funding is expected to be released in stages tied to project milestones.
  • The vote reflects the network’s Voltaire-era governance model rather than a Cardano Foundation unilateral grant.

Cardano’s onchain governance system has approved a new round of treasury allocations aimed at infrastructure and ecosystem development, giving the network another live test of its Voltaire-era decision process.

The important part is not only where the ADA goes.

It is how the decision gets made.

Treasury Funding Moves Through Governance

Cardano has spent years building toward a model where ecosystem funding and protocol decisions are increasingly handled through formal community governance.

The latest allocations put that framework to work.

Approved funding is aimed at core infrastructure and developer-focused initiatives, with disbursement structured around milestones rather than one unconditional transfer.

That approach is designed to give governance participants more oversight over whether funded projects actually deliver.

It also makes the treasury a strategic tool rather than simply a pool of ADA waiting to be spent.

Passing A Vote Is Only The Start

Approval does not mean every ADA allocation is immediately released.

Milestone-based funding creates an additional layer between governance approval and full payment.

That is worth emphasizing because treasury votes can otherwise sound like instant transfers.

The broader significance is that Cardano’s governance architecture is now being used for real resource allocation.

That creates the same opportunities and problems faced by other DAOs: voter participation, accountability, technical complexity and the risk of funding projects that fail to produce useful results.

The difference is scale.

Cardano’s treasury and governance system are intended to support a large base-layer ecosystem rather than a single DeFi application.

The latest funding round will therefore be watched as much for execution as for the vote itself.

Voltaire governance becomes meaningful only if approved projects turn treasury capital into infrastructure and applications that users actually value.

Cardano’s approach also differs from governance systems where a small protocol treasury is controlled by a relatively narrow group of token holders. The ambition here is to use governance as a recurring layer for ecosystem-wide funding decisions. That makes process quality important: voters need enough information to judge proposals, milestones need to be measurable and unsuccessful projects need consequences. If those controls work, the treasury can become a long-term growth engine. If they do not, a large funding pool can just as easily become a source of waste and political friction inside the ecosystem.

This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Cybersecurity, Part 25: Upgrading Your Model with Specific Skillset

8 September 2026 at 09:24

Welcome back, aspiring cyberwarriors!

Sometimes you might run the same model twice and get different results. That often happens when you’ve upgraded it with skills. Skills are detailed text documents that lay out the tools the model should use, the approach it should take and how it should analyze the results. Good skills are practical, pulled from actual reports on HackerOne and other bug bounty platforms. A model can still lean on its own knowledge, but that’s just less efficient.

There are plenty of skills out there you might come across, but not everything can be trusted. Some skills can simply be dangerous and infect your system. To make sure they are safe, you can check them with SkillSpector by NVIDIA, so you don’t end up with anything malicious on your system.

Bug Bounty Skills

Both of these repositories do bug bounty hunting end to end, but they go about it in almost opposite ways.

The first is called Bountyforge. It’s actually just one single skill file, but it’s smart enough to split itself into eight different mini agents that all work at the same time. One looks at websites and apps, another at crypto and blockchain, others go after different angles hackers can exploit. It also checks each finding with four different tests to make sure it’s not a false alarm. Then you get a report in whatever format the bug bounty program wants.

bountyforge

You don’t even need Claude Code or any other coding tool for this, you can just run it right inside the regular Claude website in your browser.

The second bug bounty repository is Claude-BugHunter. It takes the opposite approach. The repo has 83 skills and almost half of those were built by studying 681 real bug reports that people actually got paid for on HackerOne. These skills aren’t locked to Claude Code either, you can use OpenCode, Codex or Hermes Agents with them.

Here are a few examples of the results we got with these skills.

API endpoints are often vulnerable and this is worth trying your luck on to see how it goes.

api abuse found

Another approach can be APK reverse engineering. Here we found a hardcoded RSA-2048 signing private key baked into the published APK. With that key, hackers can push a new app to the app store and infect every employee phone, getting access not just to the WiFi network at the workplace but to their personal life too. Quite dangerous.

supply chain attack found

We found an API endpoint vulnerable to an SQL injection and managed to pull the entire database.

sqli injection found

Having skills built on real attacks keeps the model from wandering off into its own weird approaches and missing a lot of good findings. 

Active Directory Skills

Claude-AD was made by ADScanPro for testing a company’s internal network. It gives your model a playbook with skills and agents built for an Active Directory assessment. The developers are upfront that it’s not an auto pwn tool. It’s meant to guide you through the assessment. Every finding can get mapped to a compliance control (DORA, NIS2 and ENS).

Claude-AD is very careful about getting caught too. It explains what a security team would actually see on their end if that technique got used. And any time it’s about to do something that would actually change things on the company’s network, it stops and asks for confirmation first.

General Cybersecurity Skills

Antropic-Cybersecurity-Skills is basically a giant reference book. It has 817 skills covering 29 areas of security work, cloud security, malware analysis, all the way down to hardware and firmware. Each skill is its own small file, so your agent will quickly pull out the two or three it actually needs for its task.

antropic cybersecurity skills

Every skill ties back to real security frameworks that companies and auditors already use (NIST CSF, MITRE ATT&CK and so on). So if your model finds a problem using one of these skills, it can also tell you exactly which official standard it violates. You can use it to justify findings to a compliance team.

SCADA Skills

On an industrial network, a clumsy scan can shut down a production line or damage physical equipment, since a lot of this gear is old and wasn’t built to handle unexpected traffic. That’s why the ICS skill by Masriyan is built to never actively touch a live industrial network. Instead, it works off network captures someone already took. It reads the file, recognizes industrial protocols by the ports they normally run on (Modbus, DNP3, Siemens S7, EtherNet/IP, OPC-UA, and more) and counts which devices are talking to each other. It then shows you write commands, these are the ones that change a value on an industrial device. That’s the traffic you want to see first.

scada ai skills

The second mode skips network captures and instead searches for exposed industrial equipment using Shodan and Censys. The skill can also help your model reason about how an industrial network is laid out and check findings against MITRE’s ICS specific attack framework and the IEC 62443 security standard.

Science Skills

Although science isn’t really what we want to focus on here, in one of our SCADA articles we mentioned that to carry out a successful attack requires hackers to understand the technical process of the plant. That means understanding how the chemicals are produced and which units are used along the way. We also showed how vinyl acetate is produced and talked about paracetamol production.

1 kg of paracetamol at 100% purity was reported to cost €8,205, while 1 kg at 99% purity cost just €5. So even a single day of sabotage could cause serious financial damage to an enterprise.

paracetamol price and purity

Finding a scientist among hackers is quite a challenge, which is why Stuxnet needed a group of people from different backgrounds working toward one objective. But now hackers can just import different skills to make their attacks more devastating. K-Dense published 140 skills with access to different scientific databases and Python tools.

The real concern here isn’t ICS exploits inside the repository, there aren’t any. It’s the access to sensitive scientific data paired with an AI agent that can actually understand that data and change it.

ai science skills

Summary

AI skills can be a gamechanger, especially when they’re based on actual reports hackers got paid for. These skills show your model how to approach things and what tools to use during the test, so it doesn’t wander off hallucinating and inventing its own ways of testing things. That can wreck your bug bounty flow, since you’ll end up overlooking plenty of potential targets.

Simply relying on the AI to find things isn’t enough, hunters that do it keep getting a lot of dupes. You need to test things manually too. For this reason we created our Bug Bounty training to show you how to find bugs and work with the AI more efficiently.

The post Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Cybersecurity, Part 25: Upgrading Your Model with Specific Skillset first appeared on Hackers Arise.

SCADA/ICS/OT Hacking and Security: Hacking with SCADAver

31 August 2026 at 11:54

Welcome back, cyberwarriors!

Lately we’ve been seeing more reports on attacks against industrial facilities. It’s often the case that the hardware behind these facilities has been vulnerable and overlooked for years. Administrators may know how to set these systems up and keep them running, but they don’t know how to secure them. So many SCADA/ICS/OT systems are reachable from the internet, and basically anyone can interact with them.

There are plenty of tools out there built to test specific functions of SCADA systems, but SCADAver seems to pack a lot more features into just one tool. That’s why we’ll cover it today.

SCADAver

SCADAver is a new tool written in Rust. It came out recently. The tool can discover, fingerprint, enumerate and test systems across common industrial protocols. In one binary you get a CLI interface, a terminal UI and a browser UI.

This project is still experimental. It’s built from public protocol documentation, vulnerability advisories and security research. It works pretty well for assessing device security internally, but you can also use it against devices reachable from the internet, since plenty of them are insecure. And it’s not just active interaction either, SCADAver supports PCAP file analysis too. The tool can also set up a rogue device you can test safely.

Setting Up

We’ll go with the quickest route and just download the compiled version. The developer has it available for Windows, macOS and Linux.

ubuntu > curl https://github.com/Whispergate/SCADAVER/releases/download/v1.5.1/scadaver-linux-x86_64

ubuntu > mv scadaver-linux-x86_64 scadaver
ubuntu > mv scadaver /usr/bin

Working with SCADAver

We’ll mainly be using the CLI version throughout the demonstration, though the terminal UI and browser UI will get shown too. The CLI version will probably be the most convenient for a lot of you.

First let’s list the help menu and see what the tool has:

ubuntu > scadaver -h 

As you can see, we’ve got commands here. Each command has its own help menu where you’ll find more information on exploits and other flags. You’ll see it later.

Siemens S7 – Basics 

Let’s do a basic scan of a Siemens system and see what the tool comes back with.

# a basic scan 
ubuntu > scadaver -i IP scan

# a stealthy scan
ubuntu > scadaver -z -i IP scan

It found port 102 open, and it was Siemens indeed.

We can also do a protocol specific scan or point it at a custom port if necessary:

ubuntu > scadaver -z -i IP --protocol siemens scan

# or with a custom port 
ubuntu > scadaver -z -p 105 -i IP --protocol siemens scan 

Port scanning is also possible. That’ll come in handy when you’re working internally and sweeping networks to find SCADA systems.

ubuntu > scadaver run portscan -i IP

Having covered the basics, we can move on to more interesting stuff and pull some information off this system.

Siemens S7 – Extracting Values

SCADAver can fetch every switch that’s currently on or off on the system. Having a map with human readable labels really helps here, that way you’ll know what each switch is actually responsible for (pump running, valve closed and so on).

ubuntu > scadaver -i IP get io

Say you know a pump is running, now you can find out exactly how it’s supposed to run. We do that with get db, which extracts memory chunks from the device.

ubuntu > scadaver -i IP get db 1 0 64

Here we ask it to open Data Block 1, start at byte 0, and read 64 bytes. Just like with get io, we need a symbol table or the program itself to understand what these values mean. With a symbol table, we’d know that if DB1 holds 1500, the program wants 1500 rpm, for example.

Modbus – Changing Values

We’re not limited to reading only, we can set our own values for registers and coils too. Here are some examples:

ubuntu > scadaver -i IP -p 502 set register 1 1234
ubuntu > scadaver -i IP -p 502 set registers 0 100,200,300,400
ubuntu > scadaver -i IP -p 502 set coil 5 on
ubuntu > scadaver -i IP -p 502 get register 1
ubuntu > scadaver -i IP -p 502 get coil 5 1

Between 2007 and 2010 Stuxnet leaned heavily on a highly sophisticated False Data Injection (FDI) attack to conceal its sabotage. The malware recorded 21 seconds of normal operational sensor readings from the centrifuges and looped that healthy operational data back to the Human Machine Interface (HMI) and the main controller.

We can pull this off too:

ubuntu > scadaver -i IP run fdi --address 100 --value 500 --count 20

With this command we keep writing the same number into one Modbus register, over and over. Many HMIs and programs read that register and trust it blindly. So the screen or the logic keeps seeing 500 even if the real process is doing something else entirely. 500 here could mean 500 rpm, 500 liters, or 50.0°C. Only the map tells you what it’s actually responsible for.

As you know, there can be several PLCs in one cabinet, and you need a way to know which one you’re working with. Schneider’s identify yourself packet (UDP 27127) makes many M340, M580, Quantum and Premium units blink an LED on the panel. It’s a harmless identity check.

ubuntu > scadaver -i IP run flash-led

These SCADA systems often have an HTTP web interface that you can access and interact with. Sometimes, it’s authentication gated and prompts you to enter valid credentials. Here’s another run command that’ll test default credentials against HTTP Basic Auth.

ubuntu > scadaver -i IP run default-creds

More exploits and actions that run has can be seen in the help menu:

ubuntu > scadaver run -h 

Another interesting thing you might find is the database knowledge behind researching and exploiting SCADA systems. We listed all of them for Siemens:

ubuntu > scadaver db refs siemens

Browser UI & Terminal UI

In case you don’t like working with the CLI, you can try the other options.

For the Terminal UI run this:

ubuntu > scadaver

And the Browser UI can be set up with this command: 

ubuntu > scadaver web

It will be hosted on http://127.0.0.1:8888

Summary

The developer calls it a unified ICS red team multi tool, and it truly is. It’s handy to have all these exploits and recon features packed into one tool that supports so many protocols and products. Obviously it’s still in active development, since it just came out. But even so, you can already put it to use instead of switching between different tools.

We haven’t covered all its features and functions, that would make this far too long. Feel free to experiment with it yourself, since it can even set up a rogue server for you to test against.

If you want to learn how to hack and secure SCADA systems, we invite you to our training led by OccupyTheWeb. It’s available for both beginners and advanced students.

The post SCADA/ICS/OT Hacking and Security: Hacking with SCADAver first appeared on Hackers Arise.

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