Re:Researchers Found They Could Hack Wind Farms
by iancarroll on Thursday June 29, 2017 @01:47PM
(#14665305)
> You could of course filter for the MAC addresses of the devices
That would not help security wise.
Re:Researchers Found They Could Hack Wind Farms
by noir_lord on Thursday June 29, 2017 @05:28PM
(#14666985)
I'm not in the security field but it still surprises me how many people don't realize how easy MAC address spoofing actually is.
I generally describe it as the digital equivalent of swapping the plates on your car.
Just blast with full power a recording of ultrasonic bat noises to the turbines.
But as others pointed out, if you have physical access, of course you'll be able to do something nefarious.
Then, wind farms are offline all the time, for all different reasons, so this would actually not that big a deal (apart from the owner of course). And that you are able to hack into the protocols, it is not really surprising, since most of the stuff has no authentication at all. You could of course filter for the MAC addresses of the devices, but this is so much hassle for any maintenance personnel that I doubt that it is in place in that many places.
Additionally, at least in Europe, most of the wind farms are rather small, so we are talking about a few turbines at once. The large ones have actually often enough dedicated staff which will look after them.