Cybersecurity « JoNova

What if a foreign hacker could turn home batteries into “pager-bombs” but 7,500 times bigger?

Battery bombs in the suburbs?

By Jo Nova

You think exploding pagers was a wicked trick….

Hypothetically, suppose you were distracted while you tried to change tropospheric jet streams, and accidentally gave away your national manufacturing to a foreign adversary. Next thing you know, you’re buying the batteries they make, and installing them in essential grid infrastructure and thousands of homes. You’re patting yourself on the back for getting a cheap deal (never mind the slaves) and it all seems dandy until one sunny day, a leader who was cheesed off with a trade deal, quietly switched off the “overcharge protection” on all of them remotely.

At that point, millions of solar panels are pumping excess electricity into batteries that have no safety cut off. A few houses start to go off like popcorn, and an hour later we’re all living at the Western Front.

Brian Craighead – chief executive of Energy Renaissance, has come to warn us — it’s a hidden threat to national security. He says Australia has already installed 220,000 batteries that were made in potentially unfriendly places, and each home battery has roughly 7,500 times as much energy as a pager. As he […]

The Solar Panel cyber threat: Dutch hacker gets into 4 million panels in 150 countries

By Jo Nova

What if a few gigawatts of solar power disappeared without a warning or a cloud in the sky?

Imagine a hostile force had control of half your national power generation at lunchtime and could just flip a switch to bring you to your knees? Or how about a crime syndicate wanting a ransom paid by 5pm?

Steve Milloy: Communist China is setting us up for solar panel-based disaster:

“Solar panels that make the electricity suitable for the power grid and which are usually connected to the web, can be “easily hacked, remotely disabled or used for DDoS [Distributed Denial of Service] attacks.” DDoS is one of the most common types of attacks, which basically try to overwhelm a system… Solar panels were outlined as a vulnerability in several scenarios, also due to the dominance of a single country, China, in the supply chain.”

It’s only a week without electricity…

Daniel Croft, CyberDaily (October 2023)

Cyber Security CRC chief executive Rachael Falk said… that an attack on the solar grid could spark a “black start” event, which could result in the entire power grid going down. … “This […]