Can a hacker from home cause a blackout like the one that occurred this week in Spain?
Although official explanations are scarce and the theory of a cyberattack has been ruled out for now, the vulnerability exposed by the electrical system opens a window of opportunity for the most destructive digital agents.
"If this massive power outage was caused by an internal failure, the situation is worrying. When you prepare for a possible attack, your internal systems are robust and you add a layer of security to shield yourself from the bad guys, but if the system fails on its own, the risks of a cyberattack multiply because it ends up opening a window of opportunity and, on top of that, information that is necessary and inevitable after what has happened is made public," explains David Conde, DFIR & Threat Hunting Manager at Spanish cybersecurity company Thales S21sec, part of the French group Thales.
Conde is very cautious about the blackout that abruptly returned Spain to the analogue era on Monday. He points out that there is still no official version. This is actually a theoretical exercise: the firepower in the digital sphere is there and is capable of causing paralysis on the same scale as what we experienced, although with one very important difference: "To orchestrate something like this, you need a lot of resources and very deep internal knowledge of physical and digital supply systems. If Monday's incident had been a cyberattack, it would have been sponsored by a state and we would have to talk about cyberterrorism," he points out.
In Ukraine, the Russian invasion has unleashed a war that is not only physical, but also (and increasingly) digital. Conde anticipates that in the future, conflicts will no longer directly cause fatalities. "War is now hybrid and will end up being 100% digital. The impacts will be faster and the importance of drones will grow. When we talk about cyberwarfare, we must understand that it has no beginning and no end; there are always operations between governments, and there are kill switches (defence mechanisms that would allow the US, for example, to sell weapons to third parties that are designed to disconnect if they are used against the selling country)."
