“Go there,” Aditya’s Sood says that a solar power in India appears on his screen as a distance dashboard for plans. The US -based hacker is on a mission to educate cyber security. Speaking on a video call with DW, he is showing how easy it is to log in to a plan in the Tamil Nadu region of Southern India.
“You know, people deploy their equipment and really forget to change [default] Password. Or he has configured a very weak password, “Sood says he is pointing to an open system in front of him on screen.”
The German company Solar Log, who designed the control setup used in the Indian plant, later told DW that his software can replace the settings in some configurations of users in some of the power that the system feeds in the grid. So it is possible for “weak password assigned” in the past, the company said in an email.
“While it is technically possible to assign a weak password for a customer and provide open access to your network on the Internet, we do not recommend it.
For this story, DW spoke to three separate cyber space experts who said that they would be able to reach millions of units at once. They claim that they had Those plants manipulated the power to feed the European power grid, they could cause blackouts. – A real danger between the Hyprrid war against the West initiated by Russia and others.
Weak place of solar energy energy security?
At Aachen, Rwth Technical University in Germany, Andreas Ulbig and his team have been studying danger for interconnected energy systems over the years.
In the university campus, a huge hall is similar to the houses of a warehouse, which is next to the old-fashioned, the man-shaped transistor station next to the modern inverter-devices that converts energy from the photovoltaic system.
Ulbig says that digitization of Europe’s power grid is necessary as the block has “shifted from a few hundred big thermal plants to provide electricity with several million wind turbines, photovoltaic inverters and battery storage units.”
Infection for millions of renewable energy units “cannot be operated in a manual way,” he told DW.
But the expert at the active energy distribution grid said that smart-grid systems can invite hackers to tinkers, for example, solar energy installation across Europe, forcing them to Thame Thame power grid and potential power blackout. However, he said that it would be “difficult” for an attacker to coordinate access to enough plants at once to trigger the automatic safety protocol.
Unsecured big grid to attack
In most photovoltaic installations, remote monitoring and maintenance are bundled in cloud infrastructure provided by vendors. A search system is operated by Chinese company Solramen PV.
Solraman PV advertised on its website that it monitors solar plants with a total capacity of 195 GW (GW) in 190 countries – about 10% All solar capacity established worldwide,
But in August 2024, the Romanian Cyber Security firm Bitdefnder discovered a major bug in the Chinese software code that highlighted all the PV connections of the company for customers.
Solramen said in response to a query from DW, “Thesis was addressed and all customers were pushed to the update before making the bitdifer public.” Our customer has not suffered any real loss.
European Union’s infrastructure important in the focus of China, Russia
Many European Union member states have reported alleged attacks on their important infrastructure as revelations about how weak the energy systems of Europe are for cyber attack. Swedish and Latvian investigators are looking into a water -watery dissection, checking the DroneSat military bases through the Baltic Sea and Germany country. The German Ministry of Internal Ministry has added the philosophy of Russia to Ukraine.
In September 2024, a cyber attack was carried out against a solar park in Lithuania. Sibel is connected to hacking groups Related to Russia.
While Chinese companies dominate the global market for solar energy technology, many cyber security experts told DW that there were weakness in systems developed by the US and German companies.
But Samantha Hoffman told the independent security advisor working at the National Bureau of Asian Research that the Communist government in China “enhances itself in the R&D process, which is not necessarily nowhere else.”
American government agencies believe Chinese hackers have upgraded on significant infrastructure in the United States, which plant codes in a network controlling network. And there are Report that China is targeting Indian energy systemChina denies both allegations.
European Union draft bills for safe technology?
Meanwhile, the European Union is trying to curb the threat of cyber security with new regulation. While new regulation requires operators of large solar installations, which contain reaction mechanisms for attacks, so -called EU cyber flexibility actAdopted in October 2024, targets the production of smart devices. Manufacturers of digital devices with connection to the Internet should ensure that their products have a lifetime use for software updates and can reveal potential weaknesses regarding cyber security.
The European Union draft bill to increase cyber security, which is going to be implemented in 2027, can act as a blueprint for similar laws worldwide, some experts say.
Edited by: Uwe Hessler
