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European wind-energy sector hit in wave of hacks
- dangle1 5y agohttps://archive.ph/ls5xF https://archive.ph/ls5xF
- throwawaymanbot 5y ago
- mmastrac 5y agoThat's a risky move, especially on NATO countries.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- andrewflnr 5y agoNot especially. They've been doing it for years with no really severe consequences. It's clearly well short of anyone's red line.
- arcticbull 5y agoWe've been operating in a mode for probably the last 15 years where cyberattacks are simply not treated as acts of war - more like nuisances. North Korea has been behind a ton of crypto hacks and thefts, and they're simply ignored. The Russians attacked Colonial Pipeline, and they're simply ignored. There's a list as long as my arm. For whatever reason we've decided cyberattacks are not war.
- _carbyau_ 5y agoI agree it seems weird. I see two things diluting response: 1. A malicious actor is abusing the scenario, but everyone thinks "If it was set up properly in the first place that wouldn't have been possible." Victim blaming in a sense. 2. Attribution is hard. There is likely more.
- ars 5y agoEspionage is also not considered war. Testing another country by provocative overflights or the like are also not war. I think as long as people are not killed it's not war.
- samus 5y agoEven if people are killed in some localized skirmish, or a plane gets shot down, it could be escalated but often isn't.
- pjc50 5y agoThe Russians shot down an airliner, killing 298 people, mostly Dutch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17 There was very little international reaction at the time, which probably emboldened the Russian takeover of eastern Ukraine. But now Dutch artillery is being shipped to the Ukranian army.
- rossdavidh 5y agoTreating cyberattacks as an act of war, would make it WAY too easy to set up war between two countries you don't like. Attribution can sometimes be very difficult. Thus, and probably this if for the best, we don't see cyberattacks treated as acts of war. If they did enough damage in the physical world, it's possible they would be. But, since we had to read about these "hacks" in a news article about hacks rather than in, say, a news article about widespread blackouts in Germany, it does not appear that these did all that much damage. Problematic, for sure, but mostly at the nuisance level compared to, say, lobbing missiles or shooting people.
- VictorPath 5y agoWhen I say I don't want my taxes going to send weapons to the Ukraine here, I am called an FSB stooge or what have you. Yet people pile in all day and talk about how it doesn't make sense to quickly switch to wind, solar, nuclear, hydro and other renewables, which in Europe and elsewhere means gas from Russia, and somehow no one raises the FSB flag. Maybe renewable supporters just don't have that idiotic knee-jerk reaction as much.
- andrewflnr 5y agoAlmost like buying energy and funding the defense of a democracy from an invasion aren't exactly the same situation.
- VictorPath 5y ago> funding the defense of a democracy The funding coming on my back out of my labor and my taxes. Is this the democracy which started when it forcibly overthrew the elected government, banned a number of political parties right after that, and which just banned the second largest political party recently? Some democracy.
- dralley 5y ago>Is this the democracy which started when it forcibly overthrew the elected government The "elected government" which restricted rights of speech and protests, ordered police to open fire on protesters killing more than 50 people, and then fled to Russia. >and which just banned the second largest political party recently The head of that political party is Victor Medvechuk, a close associate of Putin who proudly claimed that Putin is his daughter's godfather, who was charged with treason and put on house arrest a year ago for funneling money to the DPR / LPR whomst Ukraine has been at war with for 8 years, and was recently captured while attempting to flee the country in a stolen Ukrainian military uniform after escaping his house arrest. And the point of it, for those that don't know, is to remove the last shreds of legitimacy from any BS referendums Russia might try to hold in occupied territor, in which a minor pro-Russian politician whose party had low-single-digit support in previous elections is suddenly "elected".
- skygazer 5y agoRussia seems less like a state and more like a mafia. “Nice wind farm you got there. Would be a shame if something were to happen to it. Maybe you better buy some more oil.”
- 01100011 5y agoThe West is effectively at war with Russia. I wouldn't be surprised if the US was actually the one behind the recent explosions and fires inside Russia and not Ukranian agents/military. When you're at war, cyber-warfare is to be expected(and hopefully prepared for).
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> West is effectively at war with Russia In a contest. Not at war. Decades of fighting guerrillas has left us loose with words. Tanks rolling past Kyiv should remind us of the bright line between annoying and engaging an enemy.
- arcticbull 5y agoIndeed - you'd know if we were at war with Russia because things would go incredibly well for America for a few days then incredibly poorly for everyone. America is best described as a belligerent in a proxy war. [1] [A proxy war relationship] usually takes the form of funding, military training, arms, or other forms of material assistance which assist a belligerent party in sustaining its war effort. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_war
- bcrosby95 5y agoIt's called a proxy war.
- boringg 5y agoHas been forever in proxy wars with Russia. Proximity to Europe is the large difference in this one. OP is unfamiliar with the different gradients of war which I think is why everyone is jumping on them for since the US isn't "effectively at war" with Russia.
- tedd4u 5y agoCurious about this detail: “Machines displayed codes that looked like hieroglyphs, Mr. Brandt said, indicating servers had been encrypted with malware.”
- KMag 5y agoPlot twist: they weren't hacked. They were just programmed in APL and crashed with a source code printout of the offending line.
- Jensson 5y agoIt is easy to do if it supports utf-8 codepoints. You can write them like this: 𓀀𓀁𓀂𓀃𓀄𓀅𓀆𓀇𓀈𓀉𓀊𓀋𓀌𓀍𓀎𓀏
- froh 5y agoUnicode hieroglyphs o-O Nice rabbit hole... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:List_of_hieroglyphs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:List_of_hieroglyphs
- layer8 5y agoHieroglyphs would point to Egyptian hackers, but that may be a false flag.
- mr_toad 5y ago“Looked like” hieroglyphs could mean anything. Windings font, the text from Futurama, random UTF8 symbols.
- kaycebasques 5y agoI'm all for wind energy and Ukraine but the connection to Russia seems flimsy. The article mentions the timing of the attacks (right after the war began) as proof of Russia's involvement. Just in December 2021 Uptime Wind Energy Podcast was talking about [1] a cyber attack on Vestas. So it's not like it was unprecedented before the war. I get that 1 of the attacks was by a group that publicly supports Russia. And I get that Russia has huge vested interests against wind energy. [1] https://weatherguardwind.com/cyber-resilience-byron-martin/ https://weatherguardwind.com/cyber-resilience-byron-martin/
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoThis is "current politics" 20 years ago, the blame would fall on "big oil", then it was north korea, now russia... ...and in reality, it might have been an angry former employee who just happens to know all the default passwords set everywhere. Russia basically gains nothing by doing this, except even worse relations with the germans (it's not like the germans will say "oh, the russians hacked us, we better buy their gas now")
- _kbh_ 5y agoRussia gets to rattle their cyber sabre is what this lets them do. Why do they rattle their sabre? because it has been literally the only thing they are doing in response to this war. Since day one all Russia has done is sabre rattle about the war.
- boringg 5y agoCould be but super unlikely. Also could be an Alien but the probabilities are low on that possibility as well.
- pkdpic 5y agoA time traveller trying to save us from some unseen future disaster caused by wind energy seems at least as likely as aliens.
- Syonyk 5y ago> Serious cyberattacks on industrial equipment aren’t common and take significant knowledge to prepare, according to security experts. Nonsense. All it takes is "caring enough to put in a bit of effort to figure out how to do it." The reason we haven't seen them, historically (and IMO...) is that nobody in the "evil hacker space" has generally been willing to attack actual physical targets directly. Over the past decade or so, we've seen a shift from "Only large, well funded actors attack physical infrastructure" (Stuxnet) to "More and more attacks on things increasingly close to physical infrastructure" (various pipeline attacks, the assorted industrial control system malware toolkits, etc). It's only a matter of time until the actual physical stuff is attacked, and this may or may not qualify - it sounds like the administrative side was attacked, but (perhaps?) not the actual turbines. Yet. The reality of control systems is just like that of anything else "digital" and "microchip" and "connected to a network" - they're not secure against a wide range of attackers, and the only saving grace is that most of them haven't been targeted by a sufficiently motivated adversary. We, as a general software ecosystem across a range of disciplines, add complexity faster (in hardware and software) faster than we understand and fix bugs. Shipping new things gets people promoted, "fixing weird old bugs in some poorly understood subsystem" doesn't - even if that archaic subsystem is useful to display (poorly encoded and often wrong) Xerox scans. See one of Apple's recent 0days... If you want a "secure" system for industrial control, it can't be network connected anymore. Yes, it's convenient, and the tradeoff is that someone can and will hack it, some day. Does it matter? Up to you and your company. But "air gaps" don't work, "Well, we'll use antivirus..." doesn't seem to matter, and "network connected computers" just suck at anything involving security.
- BLKNSLVR 5y ago> All it takes is "caring enough to put in a bit of effort to figure out how to do it." Which points to the statement "Serious cyberattacks on industrial equipment aren’t common and take significant knowledge to prepare" being true. The primary reason probably being that there are more profitable and more easily exploitable targets out there. Why go for the anything but the low-hanging fruit first? Conflict situations (invasion, war, pandemic) change priorities pretty significantly.
- ngcc_hk 5y ago
- tuatoru 5y agoThis is like a vaccination, a small challenge to a system that should both harden it and sensitize it to later challenges so they are detected and squashed quicker. Long-run improvement in the cyberwar space.
- BLKNSLVR 5y agoThis is somewhat of an answer to why cyberattacks on industrial equipment aren't common: They want to keep them up their sleeve. Since-Crimea-annexation years to probe and penetrate with a view to mapping out the network in order to be able to actually strike it at the most opportune time. "As soon as you can" is very rarely the best timing. Preparation is key. This is where the NSA's of the world have the dual purposes of securing internal infrastructure and finding insecurities in any and all non-internal infrastructure. For the internal stuff, there is tension on disclosure if the same security holes are present externally as well. Whether this adversarial attack is what's happened in this case, who knows. The timing is certainly interesting, but you also can't rule out false flag operations to justify other countries 'entering the conflict'.
- froh 5y agoHow do we ensure cars are safe? How do we prevent whole fleets going 90° to the left at 0545? I'm glad Tesla seems to leverage an experienced team like canonical for their basic software, I'm deeply concerned about the whole yocto derivatives world. It's random luck if your car software has regular security patches or not. Which vendors other than Tesla have the capability to roll security updates quickly? From detection via test out to the fleet? Which have security know how on par with, say, Russian hackers?