Spain’s national transmission system operator has not found signs that a cyberattack was at the root of the massive power blackout in Spain and Portugal on Monday.
“With the analyses we have been able to carry out so far, we can rule out a cybersecurity incident in the electricity grid facilities at the Red Eléctrica control center,” Red Eléctrica’s head of system operation services Eduardo Prieto said at a press conference on Tuesday.
Prieto said the conclusions were preliminary, but said that so far, the operator had “been able to conclude that there has not been any type of intrusion in the electrical network control systems that could have caused the incident.”
When lights went out on Monday, people in the street in Spain and some local politicians speculated the blackout could be due to a cyberattack. Cyber agencies and other authorities including the European Commission cautioned against linking it to a cyberattack, noting that no evidence of such an attack had been found thus far.
Red Eléctrica’s statement on Tuesday is the strongest so far that actively rules out a cyberattack.
The outage left millions of people without access to basic modern necessities. Prieto said on Monday that the blackout was caused by a “very strong oscillation in the electrical network,” The full explanation of why networks went down is still unknown.
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