With the ever increasing amount of intelligence and automation being built into our nation’s electric grid, we could also be introducing more and more vulnerability into it as well. Think about it. Our power grid has been around for ages. As such it was never originally constructed with the internet or the IoT in mind. Today, the myriad of computers that control our electrical ecosystem are subject to cyberattacks at a number of different entry points. So how do we prevent hackers from hacking the grid and causing major power disruptions? The article that follows answers this question, and does so in a very compelling way.
Last year, Princeton researchers identified a disturbing security flaw in which hackers could someday exploit internet-connected appliances to wreak havoc on the electrical grid. Now, the same research team has released algorithms to make the grid more resilient to such attacks.
In a paper published online in the journal IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, a team from Princeton’s Department of Electrical Engineering presented algorithms to protect against potential attacks that would spike demand from high-wattage devices such as air conditioners—all part of the “internet of things”—in an effort to overload the power grid.
