US provides Ukraine with secret equipment to prevent blackouts – CNN
The cost of the equipment and its delivery amounted to 1 million. The cost of the equipment was about USD 1.5 billion, but it was given to Ukrainians free of charge.
Ukraine’s power grid operator Ukrenergo has secretly received equipment developed by American engineers from Cisco to protect the country’s power grids from hacker attacks from Russia that could cause blackouts in 2022. This is stated in a CNN article published on Tuesday, November 21.
According to media reports, Cisco engineers spent weeks building and stress-testing modified industrial Ethernet switches in the United States, and in the spring delivered the prototype to Ukraine with the help of a US Air Force plane along with humanitarian aid. When Ukrenergo specialists confirmed its operability, the company sent dozens of sets of equipment to Ukraine, which can become an important tool for protecting power grids. They will not help prevent missile attacks, but they will prevent Russian hackers from hacking into Ukrenergo’s computer networks and cutting off electricity to millions of Ukrainians.
Switches are devices designed to connect several nodes in a computer network, and they work on the “flashlight principle”: a switch allows an electrical substation, which performs the most important task of converting electricity from high voltage to low voltage, to communicate with other parts of the power system. It is very important that these switches are equipped with their own internal clocks that allow them to calculate the exact time, which provides an element of redundancy and enables grid operators to see the situation even when GPS systems are not working.
According to CNN sources, employees of several American agencies played a covert role in the delivery of Cisco equipment to Ukraine. The Pentagon provided flights, the Department of Energy helped coordinate the delivery of equipment, and the Department of Commerce organized an important meeting earlier this year between several executives and managers of American technology companies and Ukrenergo representatives, who were seeking to find new ways to protect their networks from Russian attacks. Cisco estimates that the cost of materials and delivery of the switches amounted to 1 million. However, the company stated that it handed over the equipment to Ukrenergo for free.
Russian hacker attacks on Ukraine’s energy system: what is known about them
According to media reports, in the winter of 2015, the GRU first used hacking tools to cut off electricity to about 225,000 people. Ukrainians, according to the US indictment and private experts. After that, the US Department of Homeland Security sent a group of experts to Ukraine to study the forensic basis of the attack. Another cyberattack on Ukraine, which disrupted power supply in 2016, showed that Russians are improving their methods.
On October 10, 2022, the GRU attacked an unnamed Ukrainian power supply facility, causing an unplanned power outage at the same time as the Russian military was conducting air strikes on power supply facilities in our country. The extent of the power outage caused by the hacking is unclear. Ukrainian officials told CNN that it was difficult to determine whether the power outage was caused by air strikes or hacker attacks. In addition, the problem was also related to Russian radio interference, which interfered with the GPS systems used by Ukrenergo to control energy transmission.
