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:
- 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 ...
- Cloud, cars and IoT could change grid cybersecurity
November 6, 2018
The proliferation of connected devices including electric cars could provide grid operators with an operational view of cybersecurity threats and change the way the grid is secured, said Karen Evans, assistant secretary of the Energy Department’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response. While experts generally consider the internet of things to be a risky ...
- Hackers obtain nuclear power plant plans in France
November 2, 2018
Thousands of sensitive documents pertaining to nuclear power plants, prisons and tram networks have been stolen from the servers of a French company in a cyberattack, German and French media have reported Friday. The data illegally accessed from the French company Ingerop back in June amounted to more than 65 gigabytes, according to reports by German ...