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Comment by kaycebasques | Hacker News Reader

I'm all for wind energy and Ukraine but the connection to Russia seems flimsy. The article mentions the timing of the attacks (right after the war began) as proof of Russia's involvement. Just in December 2021 Uptime Wind Energy Podcast was talking about [1] a cyber attack on Vestas. So it's not like it was unprecedented before the war. I get that 1 of the attacks was by a group that publicly supports Russia. And I get that Russia has huge vested interests against wind energy.

[1] https://weatherguardwind.com/cyber-resilience-byron-martin/

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I'm not sure about when the Vestas happened, but Russia likely took more than a year to plan an invasion of this size. After some sanctions following the 2014 Crimea invasion, Russia built up its foreign currency reserves to ride out sanctions, apparently Gazprom reduced natural gas holdings in Germany right before this invasion, and Russia made other preparations to stave off sanctions and/or reduce their impact. It's not unthinkable that Russia did some preliminary attacks on renewables in preparation/practice runs in the year leading up to the invasion.

It's perfectly possible that it is Russia but hack attribution is and has always been a complete and total shitshow.

If I were executing any kind of hack attacks these days I'd consider masquerading as a state actor to be standard opsec.

It is way too tempting to blame state actors for a variety of reasons:

* Public/shareholders will be more forgiving.

* Insurance (as is the case with Sony).

* Makes you seem more competent if you "know" who did it straight away.

To add to that, once youve picked your culprit you kind of have to double down on it which means embarrassing evidence to the contrary uncovered later will be swept under the carpet for fear of humiliating everybody who said it was [ state ] when it was [ script kiddies in a basement ].

Thus masquerading as a state actor offers a decent amount of protection for a non state attacker coz once attribution is locked in the motivation to track you down evaporates.

Based on the level of success they've had, I'd say Putin was drunk and scribbled invasion on a napkin with an arrow headed south from Russia into Ukraine.

It looks like it, but it's due to incompetence, corruption, low morale, and terrible planing, not lack of planning per se. You can plan all you want, but if you do so based on wrong assumptions, and the people who you rely on to get information for the plans, and to execute the plans, are mostly incompetent stooges chosen for loyalty, it will turn out bad.

Russia always has incentive to attack, because it will drive up demand for oil and gas.

War is not a pre condition.

Who attacks wind farms for fun anyway?

It is clear that the attack is politically linked and economically motivated.

In contrast, this article makes it sound like windfarms being knocked offline was just collateral damage from the war: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/03/a-mys...

This is "current politics"

20 years ago, the blame would fall on "big oil", then it was north korea, now russia...

...and in reality, it might have been an angry former employee who just happens to know all the default passwords set everywhere.

Russia basically gains nothing by doing this, except even worse relations with the germans (it's not like the germans will say "oh, the russians hacked us, we better buy their gas now")

Russia gets to rattle their cyber sabre is what this lets them do. Why do they rattle their sabre? because it has been literally the only thing they are doing in response to this war.

Since day one all Russia has done is sabre rattle about the war.

Could be but super unlikely. Also could be an Alien but the probabilities are low on that possibility as well.

A time traveller trying to save us from some unseen future disaster caused by wind energy seems at least as likely as aliens.

Misspelt, but: https://adampage.bandcamp.com/track/preventing-a-future-disa...

Now I'm trying to creatively imagine a disaster caused by wind energy? Near human extinction from all of the cancer the windmills create? World wild exitinction from birds from all of them being killed by the windmills? Near worldwide deafness in all humans from the humming they generate? I'm just running through all of the right wing consipriacies I've heard about. I'm not creative enough to come up with that nonsense.

The California Condor is the key to ending the 2073 pandemic. Their extinction due to wind farms in 2065 is about to lead to extinction of the human race. They discover a time travel mechanism that only works for energy, not matter. They can't travel back in time and just grab some condors or open a time portal underneath an unsuspecting condor, since the portals don't work with matter. They open a time portal for radio waves and use a 5G modem to sabotage wind farms in 2022.

It turns out that all of the hysteria against 5G was an attempt by a psychopathic dictator in the future to end humanity by taking down all of the 5G towers to prevent the sabotage of the wind farms.

Although you're joking, it's important to note that the angle of birds being killed by wind farms is a tactic used by people who want to see wind projects fail or not happen but want to dress this up in environmentalist sounding language. It's not that birds are never killed by wind turbines, it's that this is scrutiny only applied to wind turbines by the fake-environmentalists when they'll happily accept the environmental destruction of other methods of power generation.

Close to heart because I know of a major wind project cancelled in my area due to the government commissioning an 'environmental review' which concluded the whole project had to be canned because it'd endanger a parrot. Meanwhile, the logging continued unabated...

> It's not that birds are never killed by wind turbines, it's that this is scrutiny only applied to wind turbines by the fake-environmentalists when they'll happily accept the environmental destruction of other methods of power generation.

Meanwhile the raptors are still shredded...

I fully stand by the statement that it's basically only fake environmentalists who care. Yes, some real environmentalists do too, but seriously: the wholesale destruction of the entire biosphere due to the rampant use of fossil fuels, the destruction of entire ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest, and some people only focus on how we shouldn't build wind farms because of the birds. Colour me cynical about most people who bring up wind farms and birds.

Again, I know of projects where that entire angle was just a political one used to cancel wind projects in favour of staying reliant on coal. I liked that parrot too; it's probably doomed anyway due to the fact that destruction of native forests is rampant. How will the raptors do in global warming?

> How will the raptors do in global warming?

Raptors will probably go extinct first because nutty activists imagine criticism of misguided environmental priorities may be safely ignored because of who brought it up...thus committing a tragic error.

My personal feeling is giant HAWT technology should be banned due to the potential for environmental damage.

Numbers, people. How many are actually killed by wind turbines, versus loss of habitat, deliberate poisoning, hunters, etc?

The big threats to smaller birds are glass buildings and domestic cats, but they don't get as much discourse.

I live about 15km from a moderately-sized airport, and I can hear the deep rumble when planes take off during the quieter hours of the day. Airports aren't getting banned anytime soon, and don't seem to have caused any measurable health problems to the surrounding population.

Same thing for surf beach communities. First time I stayed a few days near a surf beach I was surprised by the penetrating deep rumble of every single set of waves that crashed on the beach.

I think the health issues caused by living near a wind farm would be similar to those experienced by living near anything that the individual has some kind of righteous moral opposition to (read: lack of understanding of).

Imagine a future where airports can only be located 50km from any other civilisation due to the health effects that wind farms are accused of causing. Combine that with 4G being the upper limit of mobile connectivity because 5G was found to be both a Chinese conspiracy for world domination and a radiation health risk.

In 2100, aliens arrive. It turns out that Earth is just perfectly temperate for them. The only way to avoid their conquest of the planet is to make it a couple degrees hotter than we're already on track for (they are very picky).

Morbo the Annihilator has finally had enough of people building windmills to try to keep the Earth cool with big fans.

> "oh, the russians hacked us, we better buy their gas now"

Unless, as they know, the Russians know, and everybody knows, they don't have any choice in the matter. They can't replace Russian gas imports, and without them their economy would be severely crippled ( as argued by many unions, trade body representatives, etc.).

A former worker of three companies?

Or working at one scada company that built the system for all three.

I'm just saying that it's convenient to just blame russia for everything without any proof.

They have a habit of doing it(for years/decades) and it would really help them if people couldn't rely on other sources of energy than what they're selling.

So, who else?Who has a motive and the capabilities to do this?

I mean.. what does russia gain? Even worse political relations? Germany will fix it system in a day or two, and then what? Does anyone actually expect them to ditch wind power and buy russian gas after russia hacking them?

Realistically... by stirring the shit up in europe, the country that gains the most is.. well.. USA. Do something, blame russia, make EU economy worse, worsen the relations, make european countries stop production due to energy crisis, sell them american products, and if things get even worse, sell weapons, maybe even to both sides if things get desparate enough, watch europe destroyed again while their own economy gets a great boost.

We can ask this question about nearly every action Russia took after it was clear the war wasn't going their way, yet they did do them.

If they consider themselves at war with NATO this attack does make sense.

The same could be said about the invasion in the first place though, after the worsening from 2014, even if they managed to pull off the initial plan.

It seems more of a response/warning to the sending of weapons that has a tiny bit of teeth but not enough to escalate further.

Looking at who has most to gain from an action is an excellent starting point. What should we do, just assume everyone is equally likely until proof appears?

The US is currently better off with a weakened Russia.

EU <-> Russia relations are about as bad as they can get short of open war, trying to make them worse is somewhere between meaningless and self-destructive for the US. If the US wanted to escalate they have easier ways.

Russia is better off when the alternatives to their energy are poorly performing or nonexistant.

Don't make it more complicated than it is. You can go round-and-round all day with: it looks like A did it, but oh that's what they _want_ me to think, or maybe _that's_ what they want me to think. Really 9 times out of 10 it's the obvious.

The relations are not as bad as the media portrays them, and stuff like this would actually make them worse.

It also looked like iraq had weapons of mass destruction and iraqi soldiers were killing babies... but a few years later, it looked a bit different.

This war is just one of the many in the last decades, and the west only cares, because it's the russians doing it and not americans/nato. The world that didn't care about a 20 year long occupation of afghanistan (... and iraq, syria, libya, etc.), because the media didn't tell them to care... now they care, again, because of the media. So yeah... an attack, where russia literally gains nothing and the result is only worse relations seems iffy to me.

> The relations are not as bad as the media portrays them

They're two hairs away from direct war. You've lost the plot.

It's not that complicated. The US has is fairly open about how much they hate Germany's friendly relationship with Russia for years and has been on a near constant campaign to shame Germany into doing more to oppose them.

This hack attack "attacks" Germany without actually doing any meaningful damage. It serves US interests more than Russian.

>Really 9 times out of 10 it's the obvious.

9 out of 10 hack attacks are attributed on the basis of little more than an IP address and the politically convenient culprit is blamed. It'd be an easy thing to get away with.

> This hack attack "attacks" Germany without actually doing any meaningful damage. It serves US interests more than Russian.

The US has little to gain, Germany<->Russia relations are already in the trash. Why bother trying to achieve what Russia already did for you?

The US has a _lot_ to lose and extremely little to gain. If they were shown to be at fault it would be a huge PR win for Russia and would basically tank the goodwill that intra-NATO has gained.

Big Oil, North Korea (under the Kim regimes), and Russia (under Putin) are all bad actors with a history of near-total disregard for human life. I'm not sure you're making the point you think you're making.

To be fair, we blamed Russia before we blamed North Korea for a long time. Russia just fell out of favor as the whipping boy, but what was old is new again. Remember when Russia was our "friend"? With friends like these, who needs enemies?

> whipping boy

A whipping boy is innocent. Russia is largely not.

> Remember when Russia was our "friend"?

No.

Being guilty of a lot of things doesn't necessarily mean they are guilty of all the things. Are they guilty of all of things they are accussed, or just accepted as the culprit because they're the Russians? If I was wanting to attack US tech, I'd be sure to make it look Russian.

I'm not Tucker Carlson trying to get you to think Russia isn't all bad, but I'm also saying that when it comes to hacking, there could be others involved.

They're not guaranteed to be at fault for any given attack. They're currently who I'd look at first for one like this though.

But what exactly does russia gain? will the germans say "oh no, they hacked us, better buy their gas now"?

> A hacker who manages to infect the industrial equipment that controls wind turbines could manipulate the machines’ brakes to stop power production, said Trond Solbert, managing director for cybersecurity at Norwegian risk-management company DNV GL.

Do that to a couple thousand wind turbines and yes, "better buy their gas now". Even better if you do it the other direction - take the brakes off in a storm, and you get https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3tqjuvy7i0.

There's a lot of interest in this sort of thing. https://www.wired.com/story/how-30-lines-of-code-blew-up-27-...

Yeah... not buying it. If russia did that, it would make them even less likely to buy russian gas again... they'd probably just buy overly expensive electricity from neighboring countries and fix their wind production.

> even less likely to buy russian gas again

They're _currently_ buying Russian gas.

> If russia did that

And they'd be able to prove that how?

If they can't generate power from renewables and the only option left is Russian gas, then it is likely.

I'm not buying it, sorry...

The worst thing russia can do to get them to buy more gas, is to directly attack them. Do you really expect them to even talk to russia, if russia did that? Just the outrage (fueled by the media) would make people forgive the government the highly inflated prices of imported electricity, while they fixed the wind production. Russia literally has nothing to gain by doing this, and a lot to lose...

They would not currently be buying a drop of gas if they had a realistic choice. They don't.

Do you seriously think Russians care whether Germany will buy their gas after they’ve started literal war at their footsteps?

There seems to be a correlation between the political demographic in Germany that hates wind turbines and the one that supports Putin. Maybe someone thinks creating more wind turbine haters will increase support for Russia.

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