The company works with various banks and electronics
companies to ensure that everything from TV set-top boxes to
credit card terminals are secure. For meter makers and their
suppliers, they should think of smart meters as a similar
piece of consumer electronics when it comes to fraud
protection and privacy, said Jun. In the case of scramblers
for cable boxes, the theft amounted to more than $4 billion
annually , according to researchers at Pennsylvania State
University.
For criminals who leverage connected networks for financial
gain, scale is the name of the game. For online identify
fraud, an estimated 70 percent is related to organized crime
, according to CBS News. In the case of
smart meters, there
will have to be millions available to make any organized
criminals interested in trying to hack them, so now is the
time for meter companies and their suppliers to build in the
proper security.
Currently, electricity theft in the U.S. is estimated at $6
billion, according to a report by IEEE. However, that is far
lower than in some other countries, where stealing power
happens all the time. In British Columbia, electricity theft
is used to mask grow operations for marijuana; this was one
of the major drivers to implement smart meters. In India and
Brazil, stealing electricity is rampant.
For those countries, meters will deter the average hacker,
and make it easier for utilities to know when the meter has
been tampered with. “Joe Six-Pack might not be able to hack
it anymore,” said Jun, “but with connectivity comes
scalability of an attack.”
That
scalability could mean people that set up software that you
can download to hack your meter so that you don’t pay a peak
charge. In Puerto Rico, people used infrared lights to hack
the meter so that it communicated with a computer that then
changed its software setting.
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