One of the biggest hacking campaigns against U.S. Critical infrastructure has been ON from Russian Hackers and the jaw-dropping thing is, it started about 3 years ago in 2011. The Department of homeland Security told ABC News that a "severely" destructive "Trojan Horse" malware program is active since 2011 and Nation's critical infrastructure such as nuclear power plants, power grids and much more are compromised as the malware successfully penetrated into the program that runs these infrastructures. The software which is hacked, is used to control various complex operations like distribution and filtration systems, oil and gas pipelines, water , wind turbines and even some nuclear plants, power transmission grids etc. So, Any kind of disruption or complete shutdown of any of these puts hundreds of thousands of the Americans at risk.

"DHS said in a bulletin that the hacking campaign has been ongoing since 2011, but no attempt has been made to activate the malware to damage, modify, or otherwise disrupt the industrial control process. So while U.S. officials recently became aware the penetration, they don't know where or when it may be unleashed", ABC reported.

DHS thinks that this is a pre-planned attack and is taken as a weapon to be used potentially in any of the Cyber War in future. In other words, Russians penetrated into US Systems and put their key inside, so that it can be used later on when needed as an assured destruction in return of US attack. Insiders got to know about this hack last week when a DHS alert bulletin was issued by agency's Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team to its industry members. It reported recently that there has been a detection by several companies, of "Black Energy" penetration. Also, earlier this year "Sandworm", a Russian cyber-espionage group used same malware to attack NATO and some energy and telecom companies in Europe.

Analysis of the technical findings in the two reports shows linkages in the shared command and control infrastructure between the campaigns, suggesting both are part of a broader campaign by the same threat actor, the DHS bulletin said.

The attacked software is said to be very advanced allowing only authorized personnel to control several industrial processes through system, iPad or Smartphone, sources said. The software allows information sharing and collaborative control. It is reported that this attack is not single-handed, it is sponsored by state and clearly Russia is the mastermind behind the conspiracy. The researchers have already analyzed that the ICS SCADA systems in many plants have been infected