MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 24th August, 2018) German government's cybersecurity experts believe that hackers' attacks on power producers and distributors may cause massive power outage, leaving entire Europe without electricity, local media reported Friday.
According to a confidential report of the German National Cyberdefence Centre seen by the Spiegel newspaper, activities of foreign intelligence are now aimed at critical infrastructure in Germany, especially in electricity sector, and this can be regarded as preparation for a hacker attack, and large-scale cyber attacks may cause a domino effect.
If a number of German power plants are subject to purposeful attacks of a certain strength, they will be temporarily disabled, and this will jeopardize the stability of the network throughout Europe, the report said.
A certain scale of attacks may cause complete disconnection of the European synchronous grid, the experts stressed.
The report was based of the analysis of cyberattacks on Ukraine's power grid in 2015 and 2016, when thousands of people were left without electricity for several hours. The experts expressed concern about the amount of damage potentially inflicted by the Stuxnet malware used in the second attack, which was earlier used in an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.
The 22-page report was prepared by the German National Cyberdefence Centre in cooperation with experts from the National Cyber Threat Prevention Centre (NCAZ) of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), and the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), and other agencies.
