Hackers Shut Down UK Power Plant for Four Days

This story was kept out of the news for days for whatever reason. The attack is likely Iran-backed. The story was initially published in the Telegraph newspaper but there has been no information from government sources like the National Cyber Security Centre. Other newspapers did report about it later, but mostly based on what the Telegraph already reported. The BBC reported as well, but, as is too often the case with tech stories, they got at least part of it wrong.

So what happened? A small UK power plant was down for four days. The government is not saying why. They are not saying why it took four days to recover or who got in or how they got in.

As we know, there have been a number of attacks against US critical infrastructure such as water, telecommunications and power since we attacked Iran.

In fact, there have been attacks in Israel (military, government, energy, more), the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait and multiple other countries. So, assuming these attacks are from Iran or their proxies, they have been pretty successful for a country that we have been attacking for six months.

We don’t know is why it took four days to recover and whether smaller operators are adequately protected. We know, unofficially, the answer to the second question and it is a definite NO.

In the UK, power plants this size do not have to report incidents to the government. I am not sure if there is a similar rule in the US.

Even so, the National Cybersecurity Center did brief energy executives. I assume similar actions occured in the US.

This one attack could just be a test. If they figure out what worked here, maybe they would scale this to multiple facilities. That could be a problem. But a fix is a lot harder. It takes time, money and people. If you are a big company like, say, National Grid on the East Coast or Xcel Energy in the Rocky Mountain West, you have the money (which gets you the skill, but doesn’t help much with the time), if you choose to spend it. If you are a small provider, that is a real problem.

Next time it could bigger and it could be here. There are thousands of potential targets in any country and probably ten or hundred times that many targets worldwide.

No easy fix.

Credit: Security Week and Metacurity

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