“Smart Meters: A New Vulnerability in the Electricity Grid for Hackers to Exploit”

A recent study conducted by researchers from Oregon State University College of Engineering has shown how hackers can target smart meters to destabilize the electricity grid by manipulating them to create an oscillation in electricity demand. The study is important in understanding where the grid vulnerabilities lie and what they look like in designing protection mechanisms. An associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science Eduardo Cotilla-Sanchez led the project with graduate student Falah Alanazi.

Smart meters are digital devices that collect electricity usage data and send it to a local utility through a telecommunications connection. These meters can remotely shut off customers’ power, such as in the case of unpaid bills. However, power grid components can “trip” and shut off when demand, or load, is too high or problematic for some other reason. The result is load being passed on to other parts of the grid network, which may also shut down, creating the possibility of a domino effect that can lead to a blackout.

The study used a model known as a time-domain grid protection simulator to demonstrate how causing load to vary back and forth in a regular pattern—known as a load oscillation attack—can compromise transmission. One of the types of attacks made possible by the new technologies involves hacking into the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and controlling the smart meter switches to cause load oscillations. “Imagine calling everyone you know and saying, ‘OK, at 6 p.m. we are all going to turn the lights on.” Even if a few thousand people did that, it would be unlikely to cause much instability. But if a person were to remotely coordinate a large number of smart meters to switch customers on and off at a particular frequency, that would be a problem.

An attack doesn’t need to involve that many meters. “We juxtaposed our work with related recent grid studies and found that a well-crafted attack can cause grid instability while involving less than 2% of the system’s load,” Cotilla-Sanchez said. The findings provide a jump-off point for grid operators to develop countermeasures. “For example, if they detect this type of oscillation on the load side, they could take lines A and B out of service, intentionally islanding the affected area, and thus avoiding propagation of the instability to a broader area of the grid,” he said.

The study’s findings are unsettling, as they reveal that cyberattacks targeting smart grids and smart meters can have more significant and far-reaching impacts than previously thought. Hackers could potentially leverage vulnerabilities in the system to cause massive blackouts or temporarily disrupt electricity supply, causing widespread inconvenience and even chaos. Grid operators must take note of these findings and work to develop robust countermeasures to prevent such attacks from happening. We need to learn how to anticipate and address our energy infrastructure’s vulnerabilities in an increasingly technology-driven world where the risks of cyberattacks are ever-present.