Smart grid technology may not be cybersecurity smart

 
The Department of Energy’s recent award of $30 million in cybersecurity projects for the electric grid has highlighted the issue of power infrastructure vulnerability. Smart grid technology, which allows companies to read meters from a distance, has created additional vulnerabilities, warned Kenneth Van Meter, Lockheed Martin’s general manager of Energy and Cyber Services. In an interview with SmartPlanet.com, Van Meter said that smart readers and routers at substations are vulnerable points in the smart grid.“The sheer volume of interactive devices on two-way networks is the biggest risk. By the end of 2015 we will have 440 million new hackable points on the grid. Nobody’s equipped to deal with that today. Right now, if I wanted to cut off the power to your house, I’d climb the pole, and there’s a manual switch. Everything’s physical. Once we have a smart grid in place I could do that from China,” he said. The worst case scenario would be if a hacker, which could be a terrorist organization or a foreign government, is able to cause problems in the right places at the right time to destabilize the entire grid, shutting down power to whole cities or even states.