Blog – PwnDefend

Cyber Attack on Poland’s Electric System 2025

This week there’s been a lot of activity on reporting on a compromise which occurred in 2025 in Poland.

I’m neck deep inside some project work so I don’t have time to pour over this but I did spent a few minutes prompting GROK.

“On December 29, 2025, Poland experienced a coordinated and destructive cyber attack targeting its electric grid, specifically focusing on distributed energy resources (DERs) such as more than 30 wind farms, solar (photovoltaic) installations, and one major combined heat and power (CHP) plant that supplies heat to nearly half a million residents. The assault, which occurred amid harsh winter weather including low temperatures and snowstorms, exploited vulnerabilities like exposed FortiGate firewalls/VPNs lacking multi-factor authentication, default or weak credentials on devices (e.g., Hitachi RTUs, Mikronika controllers), and poor network segmentation. Attackers gained access to operational technology (OT) systems, deploying wiper malware (including variants like DynoWiper and LazyWiper), overwriting disks, deleting files, resetting configurations, and uploading corrupted firmware to “brick” certain hardware—resulting in permanent field-level impairment and complete loss of remote monitoring and control at affected sites. Despite these actions, no power outages or heat supply disruptions occurred, thanks to the grid’s coal-heavy inertia, resilient generation continuity, and partial mitigations such as endpoint detection and response (EDR) blocking wipers in the CHP environment.

Threat Intel

Administrator:password

Imagine this, you setup a server and it has a really weak administrator password! Now let’s imagine you expose RDP to the internet. How long would it take to get pw3nd?

Well we did this, using a custom configuration to make this safe, we setup a Windows Server, setup an administrator account with the password of ‘password’ and monitored the logs! So let’s see what we found.

Threat Intel

FortiSIEM CVE-2025-64155 Exploitation Analysis

‘An improper neutralization of special elements used in an OS command (‘OS Command Injection’) vulnerability [CWE-78] in FortiSIEM may allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute unauthorized code or commands via crafted TCP requests.’

https://www.fortiguard.com/psirt/FG-IR-25-772

This analysis was conducted using data from Defused, enrichment from IPINFO and SHODAN and then analysis using an LLM (GROK) (so take the analysis with a pinch of salt):

Education

A tech demo – Gyroscope & Accelerometer Detector

Ad tech is a threat that really doesn’t get much airtime! So let’s do quick demo:

Summary of “The National Security Act in 2024” Report

A quick GROK

This document is the first annual report (dated December 2025) by Jonathan Hall K.C., the Independent Reviewer of State Threats Legislation, appointed in February 2024. It reviews the operation of Parts 1 and 2 of the National Security Act 2023 (NSA), which came into force on 20 December 2023, along with related border powers under Schedule 3 to the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019. The review assesses whether the new laws effectively counter state threats (malign activities by foreign powers below the threshold of armed conflict) while avoiding excessive overreach, protecting rights, and ensuring proportionality.

Threat Intel

SMSBlasters Historic Incidents

Whilst some people go on about DNSSEC, PUBLIC WIFI and JUICE JACKING they seem to be missing out on a threat that is real, active and has seen increased adoption by threat actors. SMS BLASTING!

Sounds cool, but basically it’s an ISMSI Catcher/Fake CELL network that is broadcasted between 500m and 2Km that lets an attacker send SPOOFED SMS messages to any cell that connects. This can be used for scams, phishing etc.

Leadership

The danger of internet exposed RDP

There’s lots of things in cyber security to consider when looking at how to defend a network, and whilst the world goes mad about public wifi and juice jacking, the real threats are often far simpler. Imagine having say an Active Directory domain member, or even controller exposed to the internet with Remote Desktop Protocol? Might sound insane but this is a common route for entry for ransomware actors.

Guides

What are passkeys and how do they work?

Phishing, Brute Force, Data Breaches, Info stealers etc. are all ways in which people steal credentials. We’ve had this problem for decades, stealing something or guessing something people know is relatively trivial over the internet. This leads to a huge volume of the breaches we have seen over the last 20+ years. Whilst people seem to understand this, they don’t seem to know how to change to fix this…. (it’s not that we don’t know it’s that change is hard for lots of reasons). So there might be a solution with the adoption of passkeys! So what are passkeys?

Defense

People and Passwords, why passkeys might change the game

This weekend at BSIDES London it was great to have the UK National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) (the UK’s technical authority on cyber security) give a talk about passkeys!

Education

All your DNSSEC base are belong to us

DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) has been around since the mid-2000s and technically works well: it cryptographically signs DNS records so resolvers can verify that the answer they got really came from the authoritative server and wasn’t tampered with. Despite that, adoption and real-world deployment remain surprisingly low outside a few countries (notably .se, .nl, .cz and some others). Here’s why it never took off broadly, and why the rise of DNS over HTTPS (DoH) has made many people conclude that pushing DNSSEC further isn’t worth the effort anymore.