News & Comment: BlackIoT: IoT Botnet of High Wattage Devices Can Disrupt the Power Grid
NEWS:
New findings were just presented at USENIX re BlackIoT: IoT Botnet of High Wattage Devices Can Disrupt the Power Grid — a new type of attack on the actual power grid (vs. SCADA systems) exploiting high-wattage IoT devices for manipulation of demand via IoT (Mad IoT) attacks to drive local power outages and large-scale blackouts.
COMMENT:
In response, a Virsec expert with insight into critical infrastructure cyber security offers perspective.
Ray DeMeo, Co-Founder and COO, Virsec:
“This is a frightening new scenario, but should not be that surprising. This is directly analogous to an internet DOS (denial of service) attack, where an army of poorly protected computers flood a website with traffic. While we might hope IoT devices are built with adequate security, we should assume they are vulnerable. Smart grid technology will have to become smarter in a hurry to detect this new type of abuse.”
Photo Credit: Robert Couse-Baker Flickr via Compfight cc
Hugh Taylor
Hugh Taylor is a Certified Information Security Manager (CISM). In addition to editing Journal of Cyber Policy, he writes about cybersecurity, compliance and enterprise technology for such clients as Microsoft, IBM, SAP, HPE, Oracle, Google and Advanced Micro Devices. Prior to launching his freelance writing career, he served in executive roles at Microsoft, IBM and several venture-backed technology startups.