The article is more about this being the first time rooftop solar has been able to acheive this, rather than renewables (as happened in Germany in your article)

It's interesting that they've stopped the public from accessing their Vulnerability DB but they've been relying on taking information from other publicly available databases for years........

Although SMB has been improved to now include AES-CMAC (on Win8/2012) the underlying hashing algorithm used for authentication is still based on LM, NTLMv1, or NTLMv2. Whilst the channel between a client and a server can be encrypted, if you can man-in-the-middle a HTTP connection and redirect it to SMB you are able to set the version of SMB and encryption level used and obtain the authentication details.