Posted on 04/09/2012 3:17:58 PM PDT by dila813
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 a cyber intelligence bulletin obtained by KrebsOnSecurity. 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at krebsonsecurity.com ...
Of course, both the cost of the smart grid and the higher operating cost will be paid by the consumers not on government assistance.
Sometimes low-tech is the best tech.
Dr. Bill Wattenburg, former talk show host on KGO before the recent programming shakeup, predicted this from day one.
Nice, I guess it wasn’t so smart after all. Anything leftists support is usually a dud.
Looks like another one.
Not surprising...
Smart meters are primarily about forcing people to pay more for electricity during the day. People who work at home and home school are going to get royally screwed.
Unless you control how people live, how much power they use and when, this is the goal, there is no reason for smart meters.
A waste of money. As for saving the cost of reading the meter... our REC had this via online telemetry years ago and it did not require a smart meter.
I think my electric co. didn't appreciate me conserving and I was conserving because I HAVE to..crooks all of them...
I trust NO one any more...and we will all watch Hussein steal the up coming election...what a disgrace this man is..our entire Congress is a bunch of wusses and they all need to be replace..hell obama does what ever he wants so Congress should just be dissolved and let Hussein rule, that what he has done for three and half years.
The electric company installed a new meter on my house. It’s digital. I’m freaking out. Is it a smart meter?
The fact that it is digital is scaring me. We all know what happens to digital items during a power outage. Blinking zeros. How will anyone know how much power I had used?
I called the company to change the meter to an analog one. CS said it can’t be done. Digital meters are installed now. Then she said that I have to push a button after a power outage. There will be a series of 8 blah blah blah.
She did say that I do not have a smart meter... something about having to call in the meter reading. I’m confused.
Now, reading this article, what if someone hacks my meter to show that I used more power than I actually did.
How do I find out if I have a smart meter? I don’t trust the CS.
Get the model number off of it, don’t trust what they tell you, just look it up yourself.
Well, you could start by going out to your meter and looking for a manufacturer’s name, model #, etc on the meter face.
There are many digital meters that aren’t “smart” meters. There are ‘dumb’ digital meters, which just have digits on the face and perhaps some diagnostic logic in them, then there are “remote sensing” meters, aka “turtles” in the power industry, which are “dumb” but can be read remotely by the power company sending a low-frequency signal down the line and your meter sends back a signal which they can read as to your usage, and then there are the “smart” meters, which increasingly use a wireless IP connection to communicate with the power company infrastructure.
Start with the basics: maker, model #, etc. Look those up first, then work from there.
huh?
Along with all of us in the networking world who have seen how embedded IP implementations are like leaving nuggets of gold in front of hackers...
these clowns pimping this crap never, ever put in even modest digital signature technology to prevent hacking. It’s all “security through obscurity,” which doesn’t last past the first reverse-engineering of a device, or a detailed examination of the specification for the protocols.
yeah, I didn't think post quite said what I was aiming for. A bit too busy to straighten it just now...
That's something I worry about. They installed a so-called smart meter at my house. So-called because the installer said it has to be read manually until far off in the future when they put equipment in to make it able to be read remotely. I worry that someday I'll see the digital readout going nuts, rapidly hiking the numbers. If it can be hacked to show a lower use rate, it can be hacked to show a vastly higher rate of use.
Nope, smartmeters are primarily about taxation. It is about increasing the revenue to local governments while state governments swallow up their traditional source of income. Since 'The People' are starting to get ticked off about other revenue streams (see red light cameras, speed cameras, right turn cameras, huge traffic fines, etc...) and are less willing to cough up more dough (see failures at the ballot box), the goal is to increase the revenue going to local city coffers by making it far easier to target businesses with utility tax hikes.
As for residentials, home schoolers and work at homes honestly are a drop in the bucket when you compare them to the percentage of elderly who are at home throughout the day who are using air conditioning for their comfort. While programs will 'help' them somewhat on the bills, they'd much rather force them out of their homes during the day and into senior community centers - another great way of skimming money into the city budget.
As it stands now, a person who is inclined to enterprise should be thinking about selling battery packs that recharge at night during the low rate times, and release their power during the high rate times of the day. You've both residential and the soon to be hard targetted commercial customers to go after, and the technical challenges shouldn't be that great.
HUGE EYE-ROLL, here.
I lost my trusty electromechanical meter to a SmartMeter upgrade program imposed by my local utility. They came out to the house, yanked out my perfectly functional meter, and lugged in the new one.
Two weeks ago I received a letter from my utility company informing me that I could have my perfectly functional old meter BACK IF...I paid them $75 to install it, AND IF I paid them $10 a month to send a warm body out to the house to read it.
They TOOK it for FREE, I’m paying for the SmartMeter they replaced it with, and NOW they tell me I can have my old meter back — for even MORE money.
Under those conditions; heck YEAH I’d expect to see more SmartMeter hacks in the future.
We all know what happens to digital items during a power outage. Blinking zeros. How will anyone know how much power I had used?
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I’m pretty sure that during a power outage you use ZERO power.
Smart meters are primarily about forcing people to pay more for electricity during the day.
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They are actually for..
1.) recording very small usage levels ... mechanical meters do this poorly and often don’t register all usage.
2.) avoiding the inaccuracies mech meters accrue as they age. (usually due to braking magnets weakening or changes in magnetism due to lightning and such)
3.) reducing meter reading costs ... many can be remote read ,, the ones that must be eyeballed are faster to read as they don’t have the dials to interpret.
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