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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."
If the new frauds against the new meters are equivalent in size to the old frauds against old meters, but with the new meters they are at least more easily quantified, it still makes sense to deploy them. If the new frauds amount to lesser losses compared to the older frauds, then its still worth it.
If not, Id try and find out who is getting the kickback for this idiotic things.
NO SIG
And where did these US corporations source all that hardware (and probably the software too)? The convient, one-stop shop of the Peoples Army, Military-Industrial Division.
Besides the fact that you don't need to mess with dangerous line-voltages, this is no different than normal meter fraud. I can't imagine anything other than incompetence being the reason this was not found. 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. You can do the numbers on a per-line or a per-substation basis, possibly even more granular than that. All the major HV lines and substations have their own meters which report back to HQ. A single person stealing electricity is somewhat hard to catch, but if substantial amounts of people got away with this for an extended period of time, someone was not doing their job.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
...it will likely cost consumers more, i.e, the cost will be passed on to the consumer. I am completely unsurprised to hear of this.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
I pay a fixed amount every month, and then at the end of the year, I either have to pay more or get a rebate. Do you think that the public utility's billing software is smart enough to notice that my rebate is bigger than what I paid?
Probably not.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
"Oh, and let's make sure to contract these meters out to the lowest bidder because after all, people are morons and if they don't realize that we're shafting them by getting them to pay more for their electricity, certainly they will never be smart enough to figure out our meters"
"Oh shit, our meters can be hacked! These guys are CRIMINALS help help government HELP come save us!". That way we don't have to invest in more secure meters, or go back to the old meters. No, we can continue with minimal staff, continue with crappy hackable meters, and stick the cost of our broken business model to the government, the court system, and of course the prison system. Why should we have to share any of these unforseen costs from a business model we forgot to think through properly? Maximum profit is our GOD GIVEN RIGHT.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The problems started when we deregulated this industry. The smart meter debacle is just another symptom of a system that is rotten to the core. Where I live, power rates were heavily affected by the Enron fueled energy crisis and the rates have scarcely dropped since they were artificially driven up. Year after year the power company has been asking for $0.20 rate hikes because they know they can talk the PUC into giving them at least half of what they want. All the while claiming to be losing money while the parent company of the utility is making record profits.
If the Utilities were regulated then they might have to spend a little more on the secure tech instead of the cheapest crap available. They would have a more vested interest in it since their single motivating factor is to provide service instead of to make as much money as possible.
I got here through a series of tubes
What about thieves who regularly intercept wireless signals from the meters to determine occupancy patterns, then come back and break in when no one's home?
Do these meters have end-to-end encryption? Inquiring minds want to know.
captcha: quality
They can randomly jack up the price from 4 cents a KW/h to 18 cents .. whenever they feel like it.
They usually do it during holidays when everyone's home etc or during the winter. It has nothing
to do with supply and demand and everything to do with screwing customers.
Why is this so hard? Set the whole thing up with ROM that the unit cannot change on it's own. If a hacker manually hacks their unit that is one thing but it's a really bad idea if people can "update" the firmware of the meters remotely with foreign code. Assuming they really like that idea, every unit needs a unique authentication code. By all means, have that code be centrally stored or and summoned automatically by the utility database. But compromising one unit shouldn't lead to them all being compromised. The whole thing has to be compartmentalized.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
"...paradigm shifting without a clutch"
I always liked that quote. Too bad the FA article felt the need to [edit] it.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
Obviously, this is not a good development. I also don't see this being that difficult for the utilities to detect through other means.
But the bigger question is control and oversight of these devices by the homeowners themselves. Homeowners should be allowed to directly access the data on their smart meter. It can be very advantageous to the homeowner to know when there power usage peaks among other items.
Smart meters will eventually have more control of turning off devices in the home. Homeowners need to be firmly in control of that kind of functionality. At the same time, utilities need to be able to verify the homeowner really is using what they expect.
Where I live, these smart meters are already viewed as unreliable by the general public. The local news has reported numerous stories about how people's water bills suddenly went up after these new "smart" meters were installed.
The thing is, there is no way for the general public to verify how accurate or reliable these meters are.
Ideally these should be extremely simple, easily auditable, devices. But I can imagine the specs for something like this growing until it can send e-mail... using a database... and object orientation... and XML... on the web... in Microsoft .NET... now with HTML 5... and so on.
between this and old school wiring of a meter to run backwards?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
so will homeowners start installing their own meter on the premises, to verify what the hackable powerco meter is recording? powercos are exactly the kind of non-competitive relics that believe in security-by-obscurity - that is, fiddle with the design until the level of fraud->outcry is low enough to ignore. it's not as if we don't have cheap, secure tech for exactly this kind of application.
If the smart meter does what they plan with it (IE: shutting down things I'm using) I will be looking for a hack as well.
On a 200 amp feed the common leg has to be at least 2/0 copper or 4/0 aluminum. That shit is about as thick as a human thumb, requires a radius of several inches to make any kind of turn, and you're suggesting that he "stealthily" diverted it from the meter (one thumb-sized wire) and then routed it back into the meter with a second thumb-sized wire. Not a chance that this happened unless this "master electrician" created a severe fire and electrical hazard by using severely undersized wire.
Never mind the fact this this scenario seems to indicate that a common day-timer was placed serially into a 200 amp circuit, which is just utter bullshit all by itself.
Nice story though.
internet-enable my home energy meter? what could possibly go wrong?
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
Actually your recycling is for profit.
http://noevalleysf.blogspot.com/2008/10/recycling-theft-469000.html
-- Terry
Take your meds.
This space intentionally left blank
You're electric bill
No I'm not, Steve ;-P
Even in Florida, FPL has replaced the old meters with Smart meters.
FPL went with the Silversprings solution that uses inline power communication. Each meter sends your hourly usage signal to the pole top router. The Pole top router uses radio mesh to communicate back to the major neighborhood hubs.
All you need to do to hack these things is to find the frequency the comm units use to communicate to the pole-top routers Then build a small device to inject that frequency into the line. You would essentially block the signal and the power voltage would not change. So, turn off a vast majority of devices, activate the device, then use all the power you want. Turn off all devices, then unplug the device. You can run this over the power line from inside the home, so you aren't meter-tampering.
All I would need is the frequency the products use.
IF the meters have an active ZigBee chip, you could potentially use that to measure in home power.
Yup. It's very much in the works. Doing this for one or two people at a time is easy, but doing it for EVERYONE is hard. So it's taking time. But that's the goal.
These things are not easy to tamper with and have everything from gyrometers and other gizmos that will set off alarms even before someone tries to mess with them.
Why is everyone taking about magnets and opening the meters to cheat the system. Didn't you read the article? The changes are made using wireless Infrared communication. Meaning you dont need to touch the device at all to lower your bill
The changes are made in the exact same way a maintenance operator would communicated with your meter... from a nearby distance, and remotely without opening or touching it. The changes are made as if you are an employee, making actual modifications to the settings in its configuration.
...using an optical converter device — such as an infrared light — connected to a laptop that allows the smart meter to communicate with the computer. After making that connection, the thieves changed the settings for recording power consumption using software that can be downloaded from the Internet.
So this story is quite a bit different from all the other manual methods of 'hacking' ur power meter. Its probably fast and also leaves no fingerprints. Further, there is little way to prove that you (the user) were actually the one who did it.