[Cryptography] Smart electricity meters can be dangerously insecure, warns expert

[Harald Koch]

On 2 January 2017 at 12:53, Harald Hanche-Olsen <hanche at runbox.no> wrote:

>
> I can't help with that, but I have further hearsay evidence. A number of
> years ago, I spent a week working on some modeling problem related to the
> UK electrical grid, and an engineer I talked to at the time told me that
> nobody really knows how to restart the grid if it crashes. Or more
> precisely, it has never been tried. The grid has been operating
> continuously since World War II, and while they have all sorts of
> procedures worked out for restoring the grid should it ever crash, this is
> something you clearly don't get to practice like you do fire drills. No
> specific time estimates were mentioned, but he was clearly quite concerned
> about it, and it was clear that the procedure would be quite involved.
>

In August of 2003 the NE United States and Ontario were blacked-out.
Approximately 55 million people were affected.

It took 24-48 hours to restore basic power, and about a week to completely
restore normal usage.

(There has been a lot of FUD in this discussion, btw. Just sayin'.)

-- 
(also) Harald
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