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Hacked Water Heaters Could Trigger Mass Blackouts Someday (wired.com)
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."
Not connecting water heaters to the Internet might be a better fix.
There is no need for your hot water heater to be online. Nor for your watch. Or your lightbulbs. Or oven, piano, fireplace, thermostat, fire alarm, bed, doorbell, garage door opener, iron, washer, dryer, or any of the IoT things, really. It's all artifical demand, and hopefully like the artificial demand for 3D televisions that self-extinguished in the face of lackluster consumer reception, the IoT will go away once the market doesn't support it.
Your refrigerator needs more insulation, not to run an operating system.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.