Hydro-Québec EV charger backend flaws disclosed
CISA warns of three vulnerabilities in Hydro-Québec's Le Circuit Electrique EV charging station backend that could allow privilege escalation or denial-of-service.
Sourcecisa.gov — open the original
What to check
- Applies to
- The 3 CVEs named below. Whether you run an affected version is not assessed: check the versions the source lists.
- Exploitation
- No exploitation in the wild and no public exploit is recorded for the CVEs named.
CISA published an ICS advisory detailing three vulnerabilities in Hydro-Québec's Le Circuit Electrique EV charging station backend, used in Canada's public charging network. The flaws stem from improper access control on the OCPP websocket endpoint (CVE-2026-20744), lack of authentication attempt throttling (CVE-2026-42952), and insufficient session expiration allowing multiple connections with the same charging station ID (CVE-2026-44383). Together these could permit an attacker to escalate privileges or launch denial-of-service attacks against charging infrastructure by deploying malicious OCPP clients.
Hydro-Québec has mitigated the issues by disabling OCPP on most charging stations and implementing authentication for stations still reliant on the protocol. The vulnerabilities were reported by an anonymous researcher, and CISA states there is no known public exploitation at this time. The advisory falls under the Transportation Systems critical infrastructure sector, reflecting the growing exposure of EV charging networks to remote network-based attacks.
Mentioned in this report
Detection guidance
Repeated Authentication Failures Against OCPP WebSocket Endpoint
A behavioural hunt for the technique in general, not a signature for the CVEs this report names.
Detects a pattern of repeated failed authentication responses to an OCPP (Open Charge Point Protocol) websocket endpoint from the same source, indicating a lack of throttling being abused for credential guessing or session/token brute-forcing against EV charging backend infrastructure. Auto-generated starting point — validate and tune in your environment before deploying. IOC matches can false-positive on shared infrastructure and decay as adversary infrastructure rotates.
title: Repeated Authentication Failures Against OCPP WebSocket Endpoint
logsource:
category: proxy
detection:
selection:
c-uri|contains:
- /ocpp
- /OCPP
filter_status:
sc-status:
- 401
- 403
condition: selection and filter_status
fields:
- src_ip
- c-uri
- sc-status
- cs-username
falsepositives:
- Legitimate charging stations reconnecting after firmware updates or network drops
- Misconfigured charge point clients retrying with stale credentials
level: medium
description: "Note: this rule flags individual failed auth events to the OCPP endpoint;\
\ a genuine brute-force / lack-of-throttling condition is confirmed when many such\
\ events occur from the same source_ip within a short window (e.g. >10 in 5 minutes)\
\ \u2014 apply this threshold in the SIEM correlation layer, not in the Sigma condition."
id: be3bba36-3e26-53da-8ab2-86f3d22ab8b8
status: experimental
author: Vorant
Behavioural rules are generated from public reporting — validate in your environment before deploying.
Source reporting: https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/ics-advisories/icsa-26-188-01
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