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A story in WIRED, Researchers Found They Could Hack Entire Wind Farms, described authorized researchers' efforts and successes in infiltrating and manipulating not just a single wind turbine, but all others linked to it over an internal network.
On a sunny day last summer, in a vast cornfield somewhere in the large, windy middle of America, two researchers from the University of Tulsa stepped into an oven-hot, elevator-sized chamber within the base of a 300-foot-tall wind turbine. They'd picked the simple pin-and-tumbler lock on the turbine's metal door in less than a minute and opened the unsecured server closet inside.
Jason Staggs, a tall 28-year-old Oklahoman, quickly unplugged a network cable and inserted it into a Raspberry Pi minicomputer, the size of a deck of cards, that had been fitted with a Wi-Fi antenna. He switched on the Pi and attached another Ethernet cable from the minicomputer into an open port on a programmable automation controller, a microwave-sized computer that controlled the turbine. The two men then closed the door behind them and walked back to the white van they'd driven down a gravel path that ran through the field.
Staggs sat in the front seat and opened a MacBook Pro while the researchers looked up at the towering machine. Like the dozens of other turbines in the field, its white blades—each longer than a wing of a Boeing 747—turned hypnotically. Staggs typed into his laptop's command line and soon saw a list of IP addresses representing every networked turbine in the field. A few minutes later he typed another command, and the hackers watched as the single turbine above them emitted a muted screech like the brakes of an aging 18-wheel truck, slowed, and came to a stop.
[...] "They don't take into consideration that someone can just pick a lock and plug in a Raspberry Pi," Staggs says. The turbines they broke into were protected only by easily picked standard five-pin locks, or by padlocks that took seconds to remove with a pair of bolt cutters. And while the Tulsa researchers tested connecting to their minicomputers via Wi-Fi from as far as fifty feet away, they note they could have just as easily used another radio protocol, like GSM, to launch attacks from hundreds or thousands of miles away.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 11 2017, @01:39PM (3 children)
You, and the camera guy, are forgetting the cost of installation, maintenance and monitoring - ongoing operations that don't exist right now. Those start in the six figures and quickly move into seven after you operate for any time or over any large number of installation points.
Sure, it's a small cost in the overall scheme, but these things are financed, permitted, insured, constructed, and operated on a knife's edge of profitability to begin with - 5% ROI to the investors is a good year, 0% happens too. If you drag that down 0.5%, you've just blown away 20% of average profits, and turned many otherwise break-even years from profit to loss.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by ledow on Tuesday July 11 2017, @01:45PM (2 children)
Don't give me that shit.
How much does it cost to repair a broken-into turbine where someone's hacked into it and turned the brakes off so it spins out of control and destroys itself spectacularly?
I'm guessing a bit more than a decent padlock, a door mag sensor/PIR, 2-wire cable, or piggy-backed over the data network, and a cheap bit of software to monitor alerts across the entire site for basic intrusion detection that every company who owns a lock-up or garage already does for themselves let alone people investing billions in a wind farm.
And I bet you the insurers will NOT pay out if there was no security or monitoring whatsoever, and such laxity will attract higher premiums if stunts like this come to their attention.
This isn't a question of cost, because the costs are literally lost in the noise of doing things like painting the walls, running a bit of Cat5 and everything else that these places require. It's a question of basic security of a multi-million-dollar bit of kit that even kids could break into and play with.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 11 2017, @07:34PM
I'm not giving you shit, I'm telling you why people don't bother with security... because it's never happened to them before, they have to be insured anyway, until the insurers start demanding it, it won't be done because it costs money.
Do you live in a house with glass windows? If you do your security is shit, any moron with a brick has access to your entire home with $0.50 in "tools" and less than 5 seconds of effort.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday July 12 2017, @01:58AM
That's only half the calculation. It's not just how much would the damage cost, but how likely is it? Considering that you're not going to shut down the grid, you're not going to destroy the Pentagon, you're not going to bring down the internet...what exactly is the motivation for someone to attack these things? Basically the only reason is if you've got a SERIOUS grudge against that particular wind farm operator and want to put them out of business. You could probably achieve a similar effect by driving a pickup truck through their head office -- even if insurance paid for the damages, that won't cover lost time/PR...
Meanwhile, what is the end result of such an attack? The company loses a ton of big, expensive equipment, and likely goes out of business. But the rest of us probably wouldn't even notice. Again, you're not going to bring down the grid with this kind of attack, you're just going to shut down one operator's turbines. Absolute extreme worst-case you might send a huge hunk of metal bouncing through a field...which would be a hell of a thing to see, but it'd take Bond-villian level skill to get a death/injury count greater than one. And that would probably be some farmer and his family, not the turbine operators...so again, what's the point? If you want to kill a random farmer there are easier ways.
What's your threat model here? Bored teenagers who live on farms and have a strong grasp of computer networking who want to watch turbines spin themselves apart for the lulz? A little more security would certainly be nice, hopefully they've at least got enough that they could track an attacker after the fact, but it's not hard to see why it would be a pretty low priority. There's no such thing as "secure", only "more secure" -- more secure than it's worth, or more secure than the next link in the chain. An attack here is worth approximately nothing (other than warm fuzzies of revenge or lulz), the security of the next link in the chain is approximately nothing (just ram a truck into a transmission line...), so the bar for adequate security seems pretty damn low in this situation.
Finally, consider that they wouldn't bother to hire pen testers just to ignore the results. They spent thousands on that testing, so they're at least gonna spend a couple hundred to slap on some Logitech webcams or something. And that's probably good enough.