The FBI has issued an official alert to the public about the potential for malicious cyber actors to disrupt power generation, steal intellectual property, or hold critical information for ransom within the U.S. renewable energy sector.
The warning comes as federal and local governments increasingly advocate for renewable energies, expanding the industry and creating more opportunities for cyber threats. According to the FBI, a 2019 incident underscored these risks when a private company lost visibility into approximately 500 megawatts of its wind and photovoltaic sites across California, Utah, and Wyoming due to a denial-of-service attack exploiting an unpatched firewall.
Read more…
Source: MSN News
Related:
- U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid
June 15, 2019
The United States is stepping up digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid in a warning to President Vladimir V. Putin and a demonstration of how the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively, current and former government officials said. In interviews over the past three months, the officials described the previously ...
- Researchers Link ‘Sharpshooter’ Cyber Attacks to North Korean Hackers
March 4, 2019
Security researchers have finally, with “high confidence,” linked a previously discovered global cyber espionage campaign targeting critical infrastructure around the world to a North Korean APT hacking group. Thanks to the new evidence collected by researchers after analyzing a command-and-control (C2) server involved in the espionage campaign and seized by law enforcement. Dubbed Operation Sharpshooter, the cyber espionage ...
- South African Power Firm Eskom Fails To Secure Customer Data
February 6, 2019
A security researcher resorted to a public tweet about a serious data breach involving customer data, after a South African electricity provider ignored all other pleas to resolve the leak. Security researcher Devin Stokes issued the public tweet to Eskom, which is South Africa’s state-owned electricity company. The fact that Eskom, which supplies 95 percent of the electricity ...
- GreyEnergy’s overlap with Zebrocy
January 24, 2019
In October 2018, ESET published a report describing a set of activity they called GreyEnergy, which is believed to be a successor to BlackEnergy group. BlackEnergy (a.k.a. Sandworm) is best known, among other things, for having been involved in attacks against Ukrainian energy facilities in 2015, which led to power outages. Like its predecessor, GreyEnergy malware has ...
- Operation Sharpshooter Uses Fileless Malware to Attack Global Infrastructure
December 12, 2018
The McAfee Advanced Threat Research team detected a malware campaign dubbed Operation Sharpshooter which attacked nuclear, defense, energy, and financial targets from all over the world. As detailed by McAfee’s research team, the campaign dubbed “Operation Sharpshooter” makes use of an in-memory essential to download and execute a second stage payload named Rising Sun. Moreover, the Rising Sun implant ...
- Saipem servers suffer cyber attack in Middle East
December 10, 2018
Italian oil services company Saipem (SPMI.MI) said it had identified a cyber attack out of India on Monday that had primarily affected its servers in the Middle East. “We are collecting all the elements useful for assessing the impact on our infrastructures and the actions to be taken to restore normal activities,” the firm said in ...
