The connection between an American satellite network, German wind turbines and the war in Ukraine may seem strange.
And yet.
On February 24, an hour after Vladimir Putin's speech announcing the attack
on Ukraine, the US satellite network KA-SAT suffered a massive outage.
The attack was reportedly carried out from Russia, disabling the terrestrial modems that provide the link between users and satellites.
Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian customers have been deprived of internet.
In France, ten thousand internet subscribers via Nordnet – which depends on this same satellite network – are affected
(our editions of March 1)
.
In Germany, the main victims are… wind turbines.
See also
Russian cyberattacks claim their first victims in France
Some 6,000 of these installations no longer respond to remote control.
Technically, they operate in automatic mode, but it is no longer possible to control them remotely.
However, this maneuver is essential in the event of winds greater than 80 km/h.
The situation is all the more damaging since after almost a week, the experts mobilized on the subject have not managed to restart the affected modems remotely.
The only solution would be to replace them.
However, stocks are lacking, due to the shortage of semiconductors, in particular.
The Sustainable Environment Federation relayed the incident, expressing concern about the vulnerability of wind farms to computer attacks, including on our territory.