Spain probes cyber weaknesses at small power plants after blackout

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Spain has demanded information from small electricity generators about their cyber defense because investigators are trying to determine if last month’s blackout was a weak link exploited by bad actors to bring the country’s power grid down.

Spain’s National CyberCCURITY Institute (INCIB) questions will intensify the debate over whether the country is a country of country Renewable Power was guilty of the power outage, a controversy was dismissed by Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, Deckerbonization champion.

Senior government officials have a “concern” about cyber defenses in small and medium -sized electricity facilities, especially solar and air farms that have expanded to the global renewable leader, especially as a person who is familiar with the fact that Spain has expanded.

Spain has not yet identified the root cause of the fall of the Iberian Power grid on April 27 and has not exempted cyber attacks. The Ministry of Power and Environment in Spain said “As today we are not denying any possibility. Everything remains on the table.”

Separately, a judge of the National High Court in Spain has begun investigating whether there was a cyber attack behind it.

The Spanish Grid operator Red Elactrica said the next day that there was no evidence of cyber attack on its own benefit, but no comment ever made.

The government said last week that Spain suffered a cyber -attacks across all sectors last year, among them, PER 5 percent target company or other agencies, as they announced $ 1.5 billion investment to strengthen. Cyber ​​protectionThe

The three companies that owned or operated the renewable power plant told the Financial Times that they received a barrage of blackouts and their own defense or their own defense as part of an official inquiry about what happened.

The questions include “Is the power plant to be controlled from afar?”, “Was any inconsistencies detected before the April 28th?” And “Have you installed any recent security patches or updates?”

A government official said that the authorities were following multiple investigations and the question of Incib was not a sign that an estimate about blackout was being given more weight than others.

Spain’s renewable energy has ended the Traditional Model in the country where the power generation was centered on several large, high-controlled fossil fuels or nuclear power plants.

Instead, Spain has been transferred to a system of thousands of small generators, which have created more goals for hackers through malware injection or disrupting power flow.

Possible entrance points on the system, associated with all the Internet, include firmware-powered devices that convert electricity into a safe current and include contact channels between producing units and control centers.

Red Electrica says that it receives live data from the 4,000 renewable installation of at least 1 MW generation. It may send instructions in real time to correct their production of 5 MW or larger.

However, in its latest annual report, the original company of Red Electica has been identified as the risk of having insufficient information for the real-time operation of the system “due to the increase in the benefits of renewable generation with the output below 1 MW.

Trade Group Anpiers estimate that Spain’s grid contains about 54,000 solar installations, including small -sized roof array of factories, offices and homes.

Several Spanish electricity executives said they suspected that a cyber attack had created blackout – in some parts because of the difficulty of executing one with the dramatic effect of this national. However, they acknowledged that an attack could not be canceled in a form that has not been imagined before.

Southern Europe’s Regional Sales Director Miguel Lapez for Cyber ​​Security Group Barcuda said: “A cyber attack does not seem to be the most commendable assumption on the information we have received at this time, because several different agents needed to have several well -integrated attacks.”

The lapez added, if hackers succeeded in “breaking”, then the effectiveness of the grid was needed to fully recover the function of the grid was more than 16 hours.

Anpier said: “In general … small photovoltike installations do not have systems that can be attacked and it can create electrical problems remotely. Furthermore, it is impossible to impact a system in favor of one-off disturbance on installations of this size.”

This blackout happened after Spain lost 15 GHz electricity – 60 percent of its supply – in just five seconds, made the grid destabilized and disconnected several other power plants. The outage had contributed 70 percent of Spain’s electricity before renewable.