critical infrastructure. Hackers targeting solar parks

Power supplies have been in the sights of hackers for a long time. Now even she’s caught in the solar gardens.

It is widely known that critical infrastructure such as power supplies are a frequent target of hackers. After all, there is a high potential for harm here, which government hackers can use in asymmetric warfare and enable criminal hackers to raise ransom demands as high as possible, for example in the case of ransomware attacks.

The energy supply is now increasingly covered by renewable energies, such as solar energy. So it’s no surprise that they are also targeted. A security hole has been discovered in the monitoring system used in 30,000 solar parks, which hackers are already exploiting.

used for botnets

The SolarView system used in the Japanese competition is affected. It is used to monitor electricity generation by solar cells. SolarView itself does not have any control functions, but if integrated into the grid it can be used as a gateway to beat other systems in the solar park.

The vulnerability is currently being exploited by the Mirai botnet, which specializes in “Internet of Things” devices and could be used by hacker groups for targeted “distributed denial-of-service” attacks, for example, in which websites are attacked by countless websites. Requests are overloaded.

high Security company VulnCheck, 600 solar parks equipped with SolarView can be accessed from the Internet, which should not be the case in reality. 400 of these are yet to be fixed, leaving them vulnerable to attacks.