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The U.S. Department of Energy said on Friday it is helping U.S. firms defend against a hacking campaign that targeted power companies including at least one nuclear plant, saying the attacks have not impacted electricity generation or the grid.

News of the attacks surfaced a week ago when Reuters reported that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a June 28 alert to industrial firms, warning them of hacking targeting the nuclear, power and critical infrastructure sectors.

“DOE is working with our government and industry partners to mitigate any impact from a cyber intrusion affecting entities in the energy sector,” a Department of Energy representative said in an email to Reuters. “At this time, there has been no impact to systems controlling U.S. energy infrastructure. Any potential impact appears to be limited to administrative and business networks.”

It was not clear who was responsible for the hacks. The joint report by the DHS and the FBI did not identify the attackers, though it described the hacks as “an advanced persistent threat,” a term that U.S. officials typically but not always use to describe attacks by culprits.

Dozen U.S. power companies attacked

The DOE discussed its response to the attacks after Bloomberg News reported on Friday that the Wolf Creek nuclear facility in Kansas was among at least a dozen U.S. power firms breached in the attack, citing current and former U.S. officials who were not named.

A representative with the Wolf Creek Nuclear Operating Corp. declined to say if the plant was hacked, but said it continued to operate safely.

“There has been absolutely no operational impact to Wolf Creek. The reason that is true is because the operational computer systems are completely separate from the corporate network,” company spokeswoman Jenny Hageman said via email.

A separate Homeland Security technical bulletin issued on June 28 included details of code used in a hacking tool that suggest the hackers sought to use the password of a Wolf Creek employee to access the network.

Hageman declined to say if hackers had gained access to that employee’s account. The employee could not be reached for comment.

Tainted emails

The June 28 alert said that hackers have been observed using tainted emails to harvest credentials to gain access to networks of their targets.

“Historically, cyber actors have strategically targeted the energy sector with various goals ranging from cyber espionage to the ability to disrupt energy systems in the event of a hostile conflict,” the report said.

David Lochbaum, a nuclear expert at the nonprofit group Union of Concerned Scientists, said reactors have a certain amount of immunity from cyber attacks because their operation systems are separate from digital business networks. But over time it would not be impossible for hackers to potentially do harm.

“Perhaps the biggest vulnerability nuclear plants face from hackers would be their getting information on plant designs and work schedules with which to conduct a physical attack,” Lochbaum said.

DOE shares information

The DOE said it has shared information about this incident with industry, including technical details on the attack and mitigation suggestions.

“Security professionals from government and industry are working closely to share information so energy system operators can defend their systems,” the agency representative said. Earlier, the FBI and DHS issued a joint statement saying “There is no indication of a threat to public safety” because the impact appears limited to administrative and business networks.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not received any notifications of a cyber event that has affected critical systems at a nuclear plant, said spokesman Scott Burnell.

A nuclear industry spokesman told Reuters last Saturday that hackers have never gained access to a nuclear plant.
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A senior Facebook official met with Pakistan’s interior minister on Friday to discuss a demand the company prevent blasphemous content or be blocked.

The meeting comes after a Pakistani counter-terrorism court sentenced a 30-year-old man to death for making blasphemous comments on Facebook, part of a wider crack-down.

Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of public policy, met Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan, who offered to approve a Facebook office in Pakistan, which has 33 million users of the network.

Khan said Pakistan believes in freedom of expression, but that does not include insulting Islam or stoking religious tensions.

“We cannot allow anyone to misuse social media for hurting religious sentiments,” Khan said.

Facebook called the meeting “constructive.”

“Facebook met with Pakistan officials to express the company’s deep commitment to protecting the rights of the people who use its service, and to enabling people to express themselves freely and safely,” the company said in an email.

“It was an important and constructive meeting in which we raised our concerns over the recent court cases and made it clear we apply a strict legal process to any government request for data or content restrictions.”

Pakistan’s social media crack-down is officially aimed at weeding out blasphemy and shutting down accounts promoting terrorism, but civil rights activists say it has also swept up writers and bloggers who criticize the government or military.

One of five prominent writers and activists who disappeared for nearly three weeks this year later told a U.N. human rights event in March that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies had kidnapped him and tortured him in custody.

Others’ families said right-wing and Islamist parties had filed blasphemy accusations against them to punish them for critical writings.

Anything deemed insulting to Islam or the Prophet Muhammad carries a death penalty in Pakistan, and sometimes a mere allegation can lead to mob violence and lynchings. Right groups say the law is frequently abused to settle personal scores.

In April, a Pakistani university student, Mashal Khan, was beaten to death by a mob after being accused of blasphemous content on Facebook. Police arrested 57 people accused in the attack and said they had found no evidence Khan committed blasphemy.
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South Australia has picked Tesla to install the world’s largest grid-scale battery, which would be paired with a wind farm provided by France’s Neoen, in a major test of the reliability of large-scale renewable energy use.

South Australia, the fifth-biggest state with a population of 1.7 million, has raced ahead of the rest of the country in turning to wind power. Its shutdown of coal-fired plants has led to outages across the eastern part of the nation, driving up energy prices.

The drawback to South Australia’s heavy reliance on renewables has been an inability to adequately store that energy, leading to vulnerabilities when the wind doesn’t blow.

The project is designed to have a storage capacity of 129 megawatt-hours, which is enough to light up 30,000 homes, a Tesla spokesman told Reuters.

100 days or it’s free

Under the terms of the agreement, Tesla must deliver the 100-MW battery within 100 days of a contract being signed or it’s free, matching a commitment made by Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk in a Twitter post in March.

“There will be a lot of people that will look at this, ‘did they get it done within 100 days? Did it work?’” Musk told reporters in South Australia’s capital city of Adelaide. “We are going to make sure it does.”

The 100-day deadline will begin within a few weeks, a political source said, after a connectivity agreement is reached between South Australia, Telsa, Neoen and the Australian Energy Market Operator.

Musk and a spokesman for South Australia Premier Jay Weatherill declined to reveal the cost of the project.

Musk said a failure to deliver the project in time would cost his company “$50 million or more,” without elaborating.

Lithium ready 

The battery, designed to provide emergency back-up power if a shortfall in energy is predicted, will be built on site in South Australia, a spokesman for the state government said.

Tesla said in a statement that upon completion by December 2017, the system would be the largest lithium-ion battery storage project in the world, overtaking an 80 megawatt-hour power station at Mira Loma in Ontario, Calif., also built using Tesla batteries.

The neighboring state of Victoria is also seeking 100 megawatt-hour battery capacity, to be installed by January.

Lithium-ion batteries have been in widespread use since about 1991, but mostly on a small scale, such as in laptops and cell phones.

A typical lithium-ion battery can store 150 watt-hours of electricity in 1 kilogram of battery, representing more than double the capacity of nickel batteries.

Its proponents have been pushing to use lithium batteries on a grander scale.

“For lithium technology to take off on a global scale, they clearly need the storage capacity to make sure renewables can deliver 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” said Adrian Griffin, a geologist who specializes in lithium extraction.

Dozens of companies from 10 countries, including privately owned Lyon Group, working with U.S. power company AES Corp, had expressed interest in the South Australian project.
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Street violence and gang shootings are on the rise in many big cities worldwide. Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro sees an average of 15 gun battles a day, and innocent bystanders are often caught in the crossfire. But people in Rio can now avoid street violence thanks to several smartphone apps. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke has more.
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