FBI Says Smart Meter Hacks Are Likely To Spread

tsu doh nimh writes "A series of hacks perpetrated against so-called 'smart meter' installations over the past several years may have cost a single U.S. electric utility hundreds of millions of dollars annually, the FBI said in cyber intelligence bulletin first revealed today. The law enforcement agency said this is the first known report of criminals compromising the hi-tech meters, and that it expects this type of fraud to spread across the country as more utilities deploy smart grid technology."

Re:Lowest bidders

[SgtChaireBourne]

It's not just a lowest bidder problem. The meters are designed to be tampered with [slashdot.org]. The designs were known to be defective before they were rolled out and they were deployed anyway. What is happening now is just an inevitable result of bad engineering. It's too bad that our experiences with M$ products have, for the general public, made bad engineering acceptable.

Re:No fraud checking?

[arth1]

A utility buys electricity, or makes it, and the amount they put on the grid is a known quantity and easily measured. If the amount that they are billing for is less than that, something is wrong.

Yes, like Ohm's law and Joule's law. Any electrical cable and transformer converts electricity into heat, so what the users pull out can never equal what is put on the grid.

Electricity is also not a resource like water, where if you don't pump it out one second, you can pump it out the next second. Use it or lose it. Converted to DC, it can be stored in capacitors or batteries, but at a very high cost.

Re:Business model

[tomhath]

The primary purpose is to provide an incentive for customers to shift energy use to non-peak hours. By doing that the peak load is reduced, which is a big cost saver for the utilities (less total generation and transmission capacity required).

Re:The "other" hacking?

[jessehager]

Saw this gizmo earlier today: http://www.gridinsight.com/ [gridinsight.com]

Since anyone can buy a receiver to read their own meters, I'm going to say "probably not."

Re:So how come they are "smart" meters?

[gmanterry]

I'm retired from two different electrical utilities. I can tell you that one of the things that was checked on old analog meters was the wear on the contact legs. It doesn't take many repetitions of flipping the meter in it's socket to wear off the plating on the copper legs. It's pretty obvious.

Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

On a 200 amp feed the common leg has to be at least 2/0 copper or 4/0 aluminum. That shit is about as thick as a human thumb, requires a radius of several inches to make any kind of turn, and you're suggesting that he "stealthily" diverted it from the meter (one thumb-sized wire) and then routed it back into the meter with a second thumb-sized wire. Not a chance that this happened unless this "master electrician" created a severe fire and electrical hazard by using severely undersized wire.

Never mind the fact this this scenario seems to indicate that a common day-timer was placed serially into a 200 amp circuit, which is just utter bullshit all by itself.

Nice story though.