Wind and solar vulnerable to cyber attacks

 Reuters:

Saboteurs target a nation leading the world in clean energy. They hack into vulnerable wind and solar power systems. They knock out digitalized energy grids. They wreak havoc.

It's the stuff of nightmares for European power chiefs.

Henriette Borgund knows attackers can find weaknesses in the defences of a big renewables power company - she's found them herself. She joined Norway's Hydro as an "ethical hacker" last April, bringing years of experience in military cyberdefence to bear at a time of war in Europe and chaos in energy markets.

"I am not sure I want to comment on how often we find holes in our system. But what I can say is that we have found holes in our system," she told Reuters at Hydro's Oslo HQ, declining to detail the nature of the vulnerabilities for security reasons.

Hydro is among several large power producers shoring up their cyberdefences due in significant part to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which they say has ramped up the threat of hacker attacks on their operations, according to Reuters interviews with a dozen executives from seven of Europe's biggest players.

"We established last year, after the start of the Ukraine war, that the risk of cyber sabotage has increased," said Michael Ebner, information security chief at German utility EnBW, which is expanding its 200-strong cyber security team to protect operations ranging from wind and solar to grids.

The executives all said the sophistication of Russian cyberattacks against Ukraine had provided a wake-up call to how vulnerable digitalized and interconnected power systems could be to attackers. They're nervously monitoring a hybrid war where physical energy infrastructure has already been targeted, from the Nord Stream gas pipelines to the Kakhovka dam.

"The cyber campaigns that Russia has been running against Ukraine have been very targeted at Ukraine. But we have been able to observe and learn from it," said Torstein Gimnes Are, cybersecurity chief at Hydro, an aluminium producer as well as Norway's fourth-largest power generator.

Gimnes Are said he feared a nation state could work with hacker groups to infect a network with malicious software - though like the other executives declined to divulge details on specific attacks or threats, citing corporate confidentiality.

Ukraine's SBU security service told Reuters that Russia launched more than 10 cyberattacks a day, on average, with the Ukrainian energy sector a priority target. It said Russia had tried to destroy digital networks and cause power cuts, and that missile attacks on facilities were often accompanied by cyberattacks.
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Russia's senseless war against Ukraine is exposing the vulnerabilities of alternative energy that the West is seeking to rely on.  It is one more aspect of the management of wind and solar.