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August 13, 2018 06:50 pm
Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/I-5W7C3pfqE/hacked-water-heaters-could-trigger-mass-blackouts-someday
Hacked Water Heaters Could Trigger Mass Blackouts Someday
At the Usenix Security conference this week, a group of Princeton University security researchers will present a study that considers a little-examined question in power grid cybersecurity: What if hackers attacked not the supply side of the power grid, but the demand side? From a report: In a series of simulations, the researchers imagined what might happen if hackers controlled a botnet composed of thousands of silently hacked consumer internet of things devices, particularly power-hungry ones like air conditioners, water heaters, and space heaters. Then they ran a series of software simulations to see how many of those devices an attacker would need to simultaneously hijack to disrupt the stability of the power grid. Their answers point to a disturbing, if not quite yet practical scenario: In a power network large enough to serve an area of 38 million people -- a population roughly equal to Canada or California -- the researchers estimate that just a one percent bump in demand might be enough to take down the majority of the grid. That demand increase could be created by a botnet as small as a few tens of thousands of hacked electric water heaters or a couple hundred thousand air conditioners. "Power grids are stable as long as supply is equal to demand," says Saleh Soltan, a researcher in Princeton's Department of Electrical Engineering, who led the study. "If you have a very large botnet of IoT devices, you can really manipulate the demand, changing it abruptly, any time you want."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/I-5W7C3pfqE/hacked-water-heaters-could-trigger-mass-blackouts-someday
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