Electricity suppliers targeted by hackers

The answer to the question of which basic provision is essential for human survival was answered by the American psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1943 at the latest: In Maslow's world-renowned pyramid of needs, human survival depends, among other things, on the supply of water and food. In the highly technical world of the 21st century, however, another factor is indispensable for the basic supply of both goods: Electricity.

The daily afflictions of the modern world - for example, the breakdown of all kinds of public transport - is annoying, but for a certain time it is quite bearable. The situation is different when it comes to power cuts: When the Strom in Lübeck und Umgebung ausfiel, otherwise bustling city came to a screeching halt for several hours in mid-May. Businesses and shops, including grocery shops, closed their doors because essential IT systems stopped working. Traffic had to be regulated by the police due to failed traffic lights and the radio network collapsed due to heavy overload. The widespread power failure was caused by a faulty circuit at the Lübeck public utility company, which led to a technical defect in the local transformer station. This could be repaired within four hours.

But in addition to technical and - as in the case of Lübeck - human breakdowns, which cause power cuts throughout the country time and again, another factor has emerged in recent years that should not be underestimated: Cyber attacks on electricity and water providers with the aim of gaining control over or damaging the infrastructure. According to a report by WDR, a warning to German energy providers was issued by the Federal Ministry for Information Security (BSI) in Bonn and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution on 13 June. A worldwide attack campaign is currently underway against them, with unknown hackers trying to penetrate parts of the German power grid. They have already succeeded in infiltrating the office networks of some electricity suppliers. According to a press spokesperson for the energy company E.ON, however, there are no concrete indications at this time that the hackers have access to critical production or control networks.

The transition of German industry to Industry 4.0 with an increasing number of Industrial W-LAN networks offers hackers ever greater attack surfaces to cause damage in industrial production and supply as well, due to the lack of a mature IT security concept. Only at the end of May, the Süddeutsche Zeitung revealed a successful Angriff auf Netcom BW, subsidiary of Energie Baden-Württemberg AG, in the summer of last year. Here, too, hackers had managed to penetrate the company's office network. The attack had only come to attention when Netcom BW received a warning from the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution. "These attacks show that Germany is more than ever the focus of cyber attacks [and] that it may only be a matter of time before critical systems are successfully attacked," said BSI President Arne Schönbohm.

Both in the case of Netcom BW and in the current attack, hackers first attack office networks in order to get "a foot in the door". This usually involves hijacking employees' accounts. Once the hackers have collected enough information from the internal network, the actual attack on the critical systems can begin. So far, this has only happened in Ukraine in the winter of 2016. Back then, hackers also had Zugriff auf das interne Netzwerk mehrerer Westukrainische Stromanbieter erlangt . Malware was then played on the industrial control and monitoring systems and thus the electricity for hundreds of thousands of people was specifically cut off for more than 6 hours.

In order to prevent such an attack in advance, it is also extremely important for electricity providers and other industrial producers not only to simply make the switch to Industry 4.0, but also to secure these systems in the best possible way. Here, UTM-Firewall and Endpoint Security solutions can be used for office networks. But in the industrial sector, too, there are already Industrial Security solutions that are specifically designed to secure ICS and SCADA systems.