One -third of houses in Australia now have solar panels on the roof
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Power grid surrounds the world is increasingly threatened by cyberattacks due to the vulnerabilities of home solstalls.
As distributed energy resources as a roof terrace become more widespread, grids are increasingly connecting smart inverters that manage connections to local power networks.
“While these technologies offered many benefits, they also introduce new operational and cyber security challenges,” says Sid Chau in CSIRO, an Australian government research agency.
Smart inverters convert the direct current produced by solar panels to the changing current needed to operate appliances. They also optimize energy storage and enable remote monitoring over the Internet.
These web connections mean that they pose a threat not only to the solar system with the home, but also for the wider effect generation network, Chau and his colleagues warn.
The team identified several ways that smart inverters could be hacked, including the operation of the security errors in the physical hardware and software for smart inverters. Malicious actors could trick users into providing excessive grants to apps connected to the inverter or working with manufacturers to integrate malicious code into hardware.
Chau and his colleagues only modeled the threat of inverters in Australia, surrounding a third of houses have a roof terrace. But the situation is similar to power networks throughout the worlds where the private solar system becomes more common.
While any attack would require careful orchestration and planning, the researchers found that if vulnerabilities are adapted, relatively few sun’s smart inverters should be hacked to cause disturbance.
Once the smart inverter has been compromised, hackers can then move coordinated attacks on the wider electricity grid, according to the researchers.
Of particular concern are attacks targeting the frequency control of the electricity grid. In Australia and Europe, the web frequency must remain close to 50 Hertz. While there are mechanisms in place to protect the grid, any deviation away from this can lead to cascading power system failure.
Connected risk has many inverters extremely long life over 15 years, which means that their cyber security defense can easily become outdated.
Chau says the authorities need to have better supervision of private inverters so that they can quickly override those whose suspicious activity is detected.
He also says that Therenges is long -term support for owners and compliance control to ensure that smart inverters meet cyber security and maintenance requirements.
Zubair Baig at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, says the security validation of all imported inverters is a must.
“Since these devices are not manufactured locally, there is always a chance of pre -configuration of inverter chips and firmware with malware that could bening for a trigger to detonate and to cause current oscillations, permanent equipment damage and lattice disorder,” says Baig.
Ernest Foo at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, says critical infrastructure is vulnerable to cyberattack due to its older design and components.
“Using a larger uptake of distributed photovoltaik and perhaps using machine learning and AI, Cyberattack is more likely than previously assumed,” he says.
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