By the next day, Deutsche Windtechnik had resolved most of the issues and didn’t reach out to the hackers, he said.Īs European countries transition away from Russian energy, key alternative sources will be wind farms in Germany and the North Sea, said Mr. Later that day, employees found an electronic note from hackers instructing the company to contact them to restore their data. Brandt said, indicating servers had been encrypted with malware. Machines displayed codes that looked like hieroglyphs, Mr. An hour or two later, IT staff drove to a data center in northern Germany to find Deutsche Windtechnik had been hit with ransomware the previous night. He found out the company’s systems weren’t working properly when the technology department called him around 6 a.m. The attack on Deutsche Windtechnik hit internal IT systems, not the industrial systems that control its turbines, Mr. A simpler strike on local internet-connected services could interfere with the remote monitoring systems of wind farms, he added.ĭeutsche Windtechnik Director Matthias Brandt, left. That could disrupt services to customers and revenue for producers, Mr. Guinn said that at one U.S.-based liquefied-natural-gas company he has worked with, scanning by outside groups for cybersecurity flaws has tripled over the past month,Ī hacker who manages to infect the industrial equipment that controls wind turbines could manipulate the machines’ brakes to stop power production, said Trond Solberg, managing director for cybersecurity at Norwegian risk-management company DNV. PLC’s global cybersecurity business for energy, utilities, chemicals and mining. utilities aiming to provide alternative energy to Europe have also been targets, said Jim Guinn, who leads consulting firm These hackers also discussed targeting organizations they consider to be working against Russia. Chats from Conti ransomware users leaked online last month revealed connections to Russian security services. Still, a German official said in late March that Russia accounted for 40% of the country’s natural-gas imports, down from 55% four weeks earlier but still substantially above the EU average.Ĭybersecurity experts working with Deutsche Windtechnik are investigating whether the ransomware attack used Conti malware, Mr. The country moved up its plan to reach nearly 100% renewable energy electricity by 2035 and wean itself off Russian oil and coal imports this year. Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, has rejected EU-wide sanctions on Russian fuel, arguing such a move would damage the German economy. Here, part of the pipeline near Lubmin, Germany.
Germany froze the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which was nearing operability, in February.