A Cyber Attack that took place on a Utah based renewable energy generation provider named sPower is said to have disconnected the power generation source from the Central US Power Grid.
Although the cyber incident took place in March this year, it was revealed yesterday by a news resource named E&E News after it obtained information from the Department of Energy as per the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Highly placed sources say that the attack disrupted the operator in two ways- One by disconnecting it from the Central US Power Grid. Secondly, it also made the company become the sole firm in the history of renewable energy providers to have been the victim of a cyber attack.
According to sources reporting to Cybersecurity Insiders the root cause of the attack was due to an unpatched firewall of Cisco which made hackers exploit it to the core and crash the device, thereafter breaking the connection between sPower’s wind and solar power generation installations and the company’s central command and control server.
The only interesting point in this attack is that the hacker did not continue to explore the network after infiltration, but stopped when he/she attained success in disconnecting the communication mediums of the server with the central power grid.
It has to be notified over here that adversaries and foreign hackers are nowadays a lot interested in breaking into US government networks to steal info. And the motive of some nations is to create a power blackout by launching cyberattacks on power grids.
