Russian government hackers waltzed into Poland's energy infrastructure using the oldest trick in the cybersecurity book - default usernames and passwords. The breach, disclosed Friday by Poland's Computer Emergency Response Team, targeted wind farms, solar facilities, and a heat-and-power plant with wiper malware designed to erase critical systems. While the attacks failed to disrupt power, they expose how vulnerable critical infrastructure remains to nation-state threats, even years after similar Russian campaigns darkened Ukrainian cities.
Russian government hackers broke into Poland's energy grid infrastructure last month, and they didn't need sophisticated zero-days to do it. Default passwords were enough.
Poland's Computer Emergency Response Team dropped a technical report Friday detailing December 29 intrusions that hit wind farms, solar facilities, and a heat-and-power plant. The attackers faced virtually no resistance - targeted systems were still running factory-set usernames and passwords, with multi-factor authentication nowhere in sight. These are the kind of basic security mistakes that make incident responders want to pull their hair out.
The hackers came loaded with wiper malware designed to erase and destroy the systems controlling Poland's distributed energy infrastructure. At the heat-and-power plant, defenders managed to stop the attack before the malware could execute. But at the wind and solar farms, the wipers succeeded in rendering monitoring and control systems completely inoperable.
"All of the attacks were purely destructive in nature - by analogy to the physical world, they can be compared to deliberate acts of arson," Poland's CERT wrote in the report. The language signals how seriously Warsaw is taking these intrusions, even though no power was actually cut.
That's the silver lining here. Despite the successful system destruction at multiple facilities, the lights stayed on. Poland's CERT assessed that even if the attackers had achieved their full objectives, it "would not have affected the stability of the Polish power system during the period in question." The country's grid proved resilient enough to absorb the hit.
