Jan Blomgren: Sverige måste ta cyberhotet på största allvar

There has been a hacker attack on Svenska Kraftnät The attack is attributed to the Russian-linked hacker group Everest They have a countdown on their Darknet site where they will leak the information if they don't get what they requested from Svenska Kraftnät How serious is this It entirely depends on what information has been leaked The only thing that has been said about what I have seen is that a total of 280 GB is involved If it's continuous text with very sensitive information then it's very bad If instead it is image files of for example hydroelectric power plants and nuclear power plants That's enough for 260-280 GB especially for a long time That's not a big problem It all depends on what information this is about Why is this type of infrastructure connected to the internet at all Yes because pretty much everything is connected to the internet these days It is a very legitimate question to ask Nowadays one must assume that if something is connected to the internet Then someone can get in There are no 100% secure firewalls and similar One must always have some kind of preparedness and preferably have some sort of It is important that sensitive information is kept separate from the rest in some way Men at the same time it is also necessary that the sensitive information is needed in other contexts So that's not very easy to do This hacker group Everest has taken responsibility for the cyberattack that disabled the boarding systems at airports across Europe a month ago The worst hit was Brussels They are specifically targeting infrastructure How common are these types of attacks on infrastructure How common they are you'll have to ask an expert on expensive things I can tell you about some cases I am aware of In Ukraine there have been at least two instances The hacker has managed to break into the equivalent of Svenska Kraftnät It means the control room that manages the power grid in Ukraine For those who are sufficiently geeky and interested one can find YouTube videos There you can see how the staff in the control room is completely powerless They move around on the computer screen a bunch of blips and they act accordingly It is obvious that an attacker has taken control of the power system in this case This can naturally also happen in other countries This was not such an attack this time There is a good reason to consider how we can avoid this happening even towards Sweden Russia has clearly shown that it highly prioritizes energy infrastructure in relation to Ukraine and the Baltic states The attack on Ukraine's energy infrastructure came very early Recently power plants and gas fields have been attacked How seriously should this issue be taken I really think they are doing it but it might be a bit late Because warfare directed so clearly at the power grid has not been particularly common in history Military always fights the last war So this has been a week-long clock What I can see is that people are working hard on many fronts to catch up with past mistakes in this context We also experienced a major power outage on the Iberian Peninsula Spain and Portugal Was it also hacked in some way I don't know but if I had to guess I'd say probably not That's because it's hard to find a suitable background image here Spain and Portugal the Iberian Peninsula are almost an island electrically They have very weak connections to continental Europe Neither Spain nor Portugal has been any war hawks This would be more interesting if one now imagines Russia being involved It's more interesting to go to Poland or Germany rather than just Spain So it's hard to see why Spain would be the target of such an attack The developments regarding the Iberian Peninsula have been unstable It's sad that people are still discussing exactly how it started They noted that they had very little of that type of power production that can be used to stabilize during a crisis This means hydropower nuclear power or fossil fuel power in pure Swedish People had very little of that kind of strength and a lot of that kind of strength that can't even right a boat with a slant It means sun and wind Then it has also become a political story When the Spanish government came out and said that there was no problem at all with us having too much sun and wind On the other hand there was a problem because we had too little of everything except sun and wind They have found backdoors in switches from Chinese solar panel manufacturers especially Huawei In the USA doors have also been found on transformers for the American power grid that are made in China In Sweden we have some Chinese electricity meters How large is the understanding of hardware attacks It's probably actually about now waking up from the pink dream This is something that has not received enough attention when procuring services We can say that in other sectors of society it has actually been the case When the 5G network was being tendered for Sweden Huawei obviously couldn't be involved That's why the Telecommunications Authority stated that if we let them be involved and deliver the goods then we take a risk But in other parts of society telecommunications there we have seen the problem It seems that those in the energy sector have clearly missed this I've been wondering if it might be partly due to We have had a lot of political pressure to buy that kind of equipment In practice China has a world monopoly for other ideological reasons It is the case that the equipment that is sensitive are so-called inverters These are charging stations for electric vehicles battery chargers and inverters It's something you need for solar and wind power This means within all the energy technologies considered to form the green transition China has a very large share of the world market But now they are very eager for these techniques to expand quickly It is very difficult to do it without buying Chinese Oh man you can imagine that you've been a bit lax when it comes to making demands So that one does not get hostile software and various opportunities for China to use the equipment if they wanted to Europe has become dependent on Russian gas Has anyone learned from today's mistakes regarding converters and charging stations and more I think people have learned a lot But they should have learned more and they should have learned faster Better late than never