Give me a break. Total and udder BS.
Smart meter networks have no connection to the outside world/internet. They ride on an internal network via encrypted radio waves and a LAN that has no connection to the outside world. They are purposefully not connected in anyway to a WAN on a firewall.
No they cannot easily be hacked from an outside source as there is no connection to an outside source
More false news. Smh
Here you go Wyliesdiesels, right from the horses mouth! My local POCO is RGE. Over the last few years, they have screwed up everything possible in the power grid.
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Sumita Mishra is a professor in Rochester Institute of Technology’s Department of Computing Safety and one of the nation’s leading smart grid security and privacy researchers.
“I do understand the benefits, but at the same time, I don’t want to compromise my security and my privacy.”
Sumita Mishra, RIT professor
Smart meters gather your energy usage data once an hour and transmit it back to RG&E.
The information is encrypted, but Mishra and other security researchers with whom we spoke have concerns about the path that information has to travel from our home back to RG&E.
“These meters have the wireless capabilities and the reading has to reach the utility,” she said. “
But they can not transmit at very high power because then we’ll have emission issues and other issues so they have to keep it low-powered transmissions.”
That means it’s likely the data has to likely bounce a few times before getting back to RG&E.
“We don’t have any information about whether this data is going to hop through our neighbor’s smart meter or directly go into a wireless collector node,” Mishra explained.
Why does that matter? Because it gives hackers more points of access and there’s at least one example of how that can be problematic. Back in 2021, a major storm knocked out power for days in the Dallas, Tex. area.
“The utility (in Texas) was not revealing for how long the houses were without power and they said, ‘Oh, it’s privacy concerns,” Mishra recalled.
So, an ethical hacker with a specialty antenna and some equipment on his car “drove around and he was able to get the information about which household was without power and for how long and that turned out to be because of weak routing protocols,” she said.
Jennifer Lewke, News10NBC: “And what’s the harm in weak routing protocols for the customer?”
Sumita Mishra, RIT professor: “
They can be exploited to do other things.”
Jennifer Lewke,
News10NBC:
“If I know, as someone with bad intentions, that a house has no power, I may more apt to break in because I know their cameras aren’t working or their home security system might be down?”
Sumita Mishra, RIT professor: “Absolutely. So, I’d like RG&E to be more transparent about what kind of encryption is being used, what kind of wireless is being used? If they can assure us that they are using the security and privacy preserving measures that will ensure that if there is a compromise, because we live in a world where we have to assume that it will get compromised, so if there is a compromise, it should not lead to breaches for my household.”
