The Spanish government is gathering information on the cybersecurity measures of the country’s small electricity generating companies to assess whether malicious actors exploited them to take down the country’s electricity grid, according to Financial Times.
The Spanish government has yet to determine the specific causes of the blackout that left the country without power for an entire day on April 28. Discovering the cause, as Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced in an appearance before Congress on May 7, “will take some time,” as approximately 756 million pieces of data from hundreds of facilities needs to be analyzed.
That large volume of data includes every bit of information “generated by the system’s 4,200 plants between 12:15 and 12:35 that day,” Sánchez said.
The Financial Times reported this week that the Spanish government is demanding information from small electricity generators about the state of their cyber defenses as part of an ongoing investigation to determine whether these were a weak link exploited by malicious actors aiming to take down the country’s electricity grid.
“Senior government officials are ‘concerned’ about the strength of the cyber defenses of small and medium-sized electricity facilities, particularly solar and wind farms,” according to a person familiar with the matter quoted in the report published by the newspaper.
Source: CSO Online