FBI Says Smart Meter Hacks Are Likely To Spread

tsu doh nimh writes "A series of hacks perpetrated against so-called 'smart meter' installations over the past several years may have cost a single U.S. electric utility hundreds of millions of dollars annually, the FBI said in cyber intelligence bulletin first revealed today. The law enforcement agency said this is the first known report of criminals compromising the hi-tech meters, and that it expects this type of fraud to spread across the country as more utilities deploy smart grid technology."

Comments

Re:No fraud checking?

[arth1]

A utility buys electricity, or makes it, and the amount they put on the grid is a known quantity and easily measured. If the amount that they are billing for is less than that, something is wrong.

Yes, like Ohm's law and Joule's law. Any electrical cable and transformer converts electricity into heat, so what the users pull out can never equal what is put on the grid.

Electricity is also not a resource like water, where if you don't pump it out one second, you can pump it out the next second. Use it or lose it. Converted to DC, it can be stored in capacitors or batteries, but at a very high cost.

Re:So how come they are "smart" meters?

[gmanterry]

I'm retired from two different electrical utilities. I can tell you that one of the things that was checked on old analog meters was the wear on the contact legs. It doesn't take many repetitions of flipping the meter in it's socket to wear off the plating on the copper legs. It's pretty obvious.