| > It’s also possible that the manufacturer gets hacked, and subsequently sends out attacker controlled and wrong software updates to the inverters, with possibly dire consequences. Idaho National Lab is one of those places that researches this. https://inl.gov - their domains are energy (primarily nuclear and integrated) and national security ... and securing the grid is the intersection of that. And some time back... https://www.wired.com/story/how-30-lines-of-code-blew-up-27-... ( https://web.archive.org/web/20201101002448/https://www.wired... ) . The story is from 2020. The event is from 2007. The test footage linked in the article is on YouTube - https://youtu.be/LM8kLaJ2NDU The wikipedia article on the test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_Generator_Test From the wired article the key part of how it broke: > A protective relay attached to that generator was designed to prevent it from connecting to the rest of the power system without first syncing to that exact rhythm: 60 hertz. But Assante’s hacker in Idaho Falls had just reprogrammed that safeguard device, flipping its logic on its head. > At 11:33 am and 23 seconds, the protective relay observed that the generator was perfectly synced. But then its corrupted brain did the opposite of what it was meant to do: It opened a circuit breaker to disconnect the machine. > When the generator was detached from the larger circuit of Idaho National Laboratory’s electrical grid and relieved of the burden of sharing its energy with that vast system, it instantly began to accelerate, spinning faster, like a pack of horses that had been let loose from its carriage. As soon as the protective relay observed that the generator’s rotation had sped up to be fully out of sync with the rest of the grid, its maliciously flipped logic immediately reconnected it to the grid’s machinery. |