Submission + - Europe's energy grid faces growing cyber threat (theregister.com)
concertina226 writes: Ukraine first to demo open source security platform to isolate incidents, stop lateral movement.
It was a sunny morning in late April when a massive power outage suddenly rippled across Spain, Portugal, and parts of southwestern France, leaving tens of millions of people without electricity for hours.
Cities were plunged into darkness. Trains stopped and metro lines had to be evacuated. Flights were cancelled. Mobile networks and internet providers went down. Roads were gridlocked as traffic lights stopped working.
This incident was not caused by a cyberattack, however, the Spanish power outage brings back unpleasant memories of the devastating cyberattack in 2015 that took down Ukraine's electric grid for six hours, which was traced back to Russian online attackers.
Most worryingly, it has shown how delicate the balance is when it comes to keeping national grids stable, and how failures in one country in Europe can cause an instant domino effect in neighboring nations reliant on energy imports.
The picture gets even worse when you take a look inside power plants at their IT infrastructure – a sprawling, complex mishmash of random software, aging hardware and a multitude of operating systems controlling different bits of equipment supplied by a variety of vendors, none of whom want cybersecurity teams taking a closer look inside.
It was a sunny morning in late April when a massive power outage suddenly rippled across Spain, Portugal, and parts of southwestern France, leaving tens of millions of people without electricity for hours.
Cities were plunged into darkness. Trains stopped and metro lines had to be evacuated. Flights were cancelled. Mobile networks and internet providers went down. Roads were gridlocked as traffic lights stopped working.
This incident was not caused by a cyberattack, however, the Spanish power outage brings back unpleasant memories of the devastating cyberattack in 2015 that took down Ukraine's electric grid for six hours, which was traced back to Russian online attackers.
Most worryingly, it has shown how delicate the balance is when it comes to keeping national grids stable, and how failures in one country in Europe can cause an instant domino effect in neighboring nations reliant on energy imports.
The picture gets even worse when you take a look inside power plants at their IT infrastructure – a sprawling, complex mishmash of random software, aging hardware and a multitude of operating systems controlling different bits of equipment supplied by a variety of vendors, none of whom want cybersecurity teams taking a closer look inside.
