Critical infrastructure’s long, undefended tail exposed by UK energy attack
Brief
A cyberattack that forced a small British electricity generator offline for four days caused no power outage, threatened no part of the national grid, and may not even have been carried out by the Iran-linked hackers initially blamed. But the incident illustrates a consequential weakness in Western critical infrastructure.
Thousands of small generators, water systems, and other industrial sites have aging operational technology — exposed programmable logic controllers, cellular modems, remote management systems — connected to the internet without the security programs protecting their larger counterparts, leaving easy targets during a period of geopolitical conflict.
British newspapers reported that Iran-linked hackers attacked the unidentified generator in July.